


lovers in a dangerous time

by diogxnes



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Eventual Romance, Multi, Mutual Pining, Post-Season/Series 03, Slow Burn, Steve Harrington-centric, a lot of yearning, everyone is oblivious and no one knows how to talk about their feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 59,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21526765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diogxnes/pseuds/diogxnes
Summary: “So,” says Robin, sitting back in her chair, “what’s the deal there, anyway? With the whole you-Nancy-Jonathan thing.”The question makes his mouth run dry. Why would she ask that? Can she tell, possibly, how much he’s been thinking about Nancy these past few days? How starstruck he was when Nancy showed up at his house? Does she know about the mysterious warmth in his stomach when he thinks about Jonathan? “What do you mean, the whole me-Nancy-Jonathan thing?”“Come on, Steve. She’s your ex and he famously beat you up two years ago and now they’re dating each other and all three of you somehow ended up a part of this weird little monster-fighting club together. There’s gotta be a story there.”“I don’t know, Robs,” says Steve, rolling his eyes, relieved beyond measure that that’s all she meant. “You pretty much just covered all of it. There’s not much more to tell.”
Relationships: Jonathan Byers & Steve Harrington & Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington, Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Joyce Byers & Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson, Steve Harrington & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Steve Harrington & The Party, Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler
Comments: 128
Kudos: 637





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics from the Barenaked Ladies song of the same name.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by  
>  Never get to stop and open our eyes  
> One minute you're waiting for the sky to fall  
> The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all_

Funny, Steve thinks, how the adrenaline hasn’t faded yet.

This isn’t his first time facing down monsters—hell, isn’t his second, isn’t even his _third_ if you count last November as two separate incidents. But he doesn’t remember being so jittery then. He’d gone home both times and collapsed instantly into a deep, dreamless sleep, somehow too exhausted for fear or pain or nightmares or any thought at all, really, that could possibly keep him awake. ****

Now, though, he’s so restless that he’s shrugged off the blanket someone had draped over his shoulders and stood up from the back of the ambulance he was sitting in. The idea of sitting still is laughable, even though the rational part of him knows that he should be exhausted after everything that just happened. He needs to be _doing_ something, he thinks—running or fighting or at the very least taking care of someone. But there isn’t anything left to do. It’s over. It’s all over, and all the kids are okay, and so are Robin and Nancy and Jonathan.

He looks around the parking lot, cataloging everyone in it again even though none of them have moved since he last checked that they were all still there. Dustin and Erica are on their way back, some military guy having gone to pick them up. And there’s Robin sitting on a stretcher next to Max, Lucas holding Max’s hand; Mike with his arm around El’s shoulders in an ambulance; Will perched on the edge of another. Nancy and Jonathan are in that one, too, Nancy’s head resting on Jonathan’s shoulder while he rubs a hand up and down her arms as if to keep her warm. Then, as Steve watches, Jonathan turns his head and sees him. He smiles a little—a tired smile, closer to a grimace really, but a smile nonetheless. Nancy, sensing his movement, lifts her head. When she sees Steve, she smiles at him too.

He starts toward them. He isn’t sure what he wants to say, exactly— _thank you? I’m sorry?_ He doesn’t know what he’d be thanking them for, or why he’s sorry, but the urge to say _something_ to them is inexplicably strong. They were the people who’d first dragged him into this whole monster-fighting mess, after all.

But before he can get to them, Will launches himself off the back of the ambulance and starts running—towards his mother, Steve realizes as he turns to watch him go. He can’t help but smile at the sight of Mrs. Byers and Will colliding, gripping each other so tightly that it must be painful. Thank God no one had to lose a parent today. Thank God they’ve all made it through.

“Wait,” he hears behind him. He looks back at Nancy. She’s sitting up now, staring at Mrs. Byers and then past her, her eyes widening. “Where’s—”

“ _Shit,_ ” Jonathan mumbles. “Oh, no, oh…oh, shit.”

“What—” Steve starts to say, and then he sees El, stopped in her tracks halfway between the ambulance and Mrs. Byers, and he realizes. All his elation at everyone having survived is gone suddenly, replaced by a leaden weight in his stomach. His lungs feel tight, like they’re shriveling up in his chest. “Oh my god,” he whispers. He feels off-balance, unsteady. He hadn’t known Hopper, not really; he’d never been close to him the way Mrs. Byers and some of the kids seemed to be, but the idea of him being _dead_ is unthinkable. He was always so solid, so steady, so _there_ —

Jonathan has gotten out of the ambulance, he realizes, and started towards his family. Steve watches numbly as El sinks to her knees and Mrs. Byers goes to her, puts her arms around her while Jonathan pulls Will close to him.

“She’s lost so much.”

Steve jumps a little, not having noticed Nancy standing up and moving so close to him. She speaks so softly, sounds so genuinely grieved, and he can’t help the lump that springs to his throat. After everything they’ve all been through, after everything _El_ has been through… “Yeah.” He doesn’t know what else to say. ****

They both go quiet, watching the scene that’s unfolding around El—Mike has run to her now and is hugging her from behind so that she’s crushed between him and Mrs. Byers. Steve can hear her sobs from where he stands.

“I should go,” says Nancy eventually. He glances back over at her to see her gazing across the parking lot in the other direction. “My parents are here. I should probably go talk to them.” She sounds resigned, exhausted, and Steve knows that she’s already running over the story in her mind, trying to sort out which details she can tell her parents and which she can’t. Then she looks up at him. “Hey—thanks.”

That catches him off guard. “For what?”

“For, you know, protecting the kids. Again.”

“Mike was with you the whole time,” he reminds her, “not me.”

“Yeah, well.” She looks down at her feet, scuffing one toe awkwardly on the pavement, then back up at him. “Thanks for…the thing with the car. That was…that was really cool.”

For a moment, he just stares at her, unsure what she’s talking about. Then he remembers—he’d been willing to die in a fiery car wreck for Nancy tonight, hadn’t he? He doesn’t even remember the moment when he’d decided to do that. When he’d seen Billy speeding toward her, it had just been instinct to do anything to stop him. Second nature. So much so that, until she brought it up again just now, he’d quite literally forgotten about it.

He isn’t sure what that says about him, that he was so ready to die for his ex-girlfriend.

“Anyway—”

“Yeah, yeah—yeah, go find your parents. Take care, Nancy.”

She gives him a small, sad smile. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, you too, Steve.”

He watches as she goes to her parents, watches Mrs. Wheeler wrap her in a hug. Looking around the parking lot, he sees everyone else in more or less the same positions, either with their parents or each other—there’s Robin and a woman who must be her mother; there’s Lucas’s parents, both holding him tightly; even El, though he certainly doesn’t envy her in the least, has two people wrapped protectively around her.

Steve wishes, suddenly, pathetically, that he had someone to do that for him. Not his parents; they never made anything better, not really, with their detached expressions and sophisticated voices and stiff, unhuggable frames. And not any of the kids; they’re too young to be the ones comforting him instead of the other way around. But someone.

Nancy would have done that for him, he thinks. Not now, of course. Not anymore. But once upon a time, not even a full year ago, Nancy would have wrapped her arms around him from behind and pressed chaste, comforting kisses to the base of his neck. Nancy, who had shown up at just the right moment today, just when Steve and Robin and Dustin and Erica were all about to get killed. Nancy, who had been battered and bruised already from whatever had happened earlier, and yet hadn’t hesitated when the time came to fight again. Nancy, who had still looked beautiful while doing it.

He’d meant it, earlier, when he told Robin that he wasn’t still in love with her. Because he _isn’t_ in love with her, hasn’t been for months now. He hardy even sees her anymore. But all the same, seeing her tonight had flooded him with a familiar warmth, with that feeling of safety and security and _rightness_ even in the middle of all the violence and terror. And right now, he craves her embrace so badly that it feels like a physical ache.

It occurs to him that it’s absolutely ridiculous that _this_ is what his mind is stuck on right now, even as he’s still standing in this smoldering parking lot. He almost _died,_ for fuck’s sake, in a secret Russian base where no one would ever have found him or known what had happened to him. Robin almost died, and the kids and Jonathan and Nancy herself, and Hopper _did_ die, and here he is fantasizing about a hug from his ex-girlfriend.

He sighs heavily to himself, exhausted. He can’t remember ever wanting to sleep so badly, all of the restlessness suddenly gone. Maybe, he thinks as he lets himself lean back against one of the ambulances, maybe this whole Nancy thing is just his head messing with him, a product of stress and fear and not having slept in literally days. Maybe it’s just because he’s tired and traumatized and wants to be coddled a little bit. Or maybe he’s just falling back into old habits, because he’s used to being in love with Nancy when all the monster shit is going down. Yes, he rationalizes, that must be it. He isn’t in love with her. He _loves_ her, sure, but there’s no way he’s actually _in_ love with her.

After all, he thinks, glancing again at Jonathan, who is still holding onto his little brother—after all, seeing her with Jonathan today, he hadn’t felt anything but warmth towards both of them.

—

Robin and Dustin are at his door the next day.

Both of them are looking at him expectantly, and a little impatiently, maybe, and he looks between them in confusion. “Hi?” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“Checking on you,” says Dustin, the _obviously_ unspoken but unmistakeable. “You just, like, ran off last night, man. How did you even get home?”

Steve is pretty sure Dustin already knows the answer to that question, and he’s pretty sure it’s the reason Dustin seems so annoyed, but he also knows that Dustin isn’t going to stop glaring at him until he responds. “I, uh. Walked.”

Dustin levels a stern finger at him, as if he’s his mother and not a fourteen-year-old kid. “You should have _at least_ let someone drive you home, asshole,” he says. “What if you’d just, I don’t know, died from slow-acting Russian poison or something somewhere in the middle of the woods?”

Instinctively, Steve opens his mouth to protest, but then shuts it again, because the little shit does have a point. Walking home last night was stupid. Now, after a few hours of sleep, with the adrenaline having finally drained out of him and every part of his body throbbing, that seems obvious. But last night, not having his car keys and most of the kids already having gone home, it had seemed easier to just slip away unnoticed than to bug a fourteen-year-old kid’s parents fora ride home. It’s possible, he realizes, that he was a bit more in shock last night than he had thought, a bit less clearheaded. So he just says, “Sorry, man. You’re right.”

Dustin blinks at him, clearly taken aback by Steve’s lack of argument. The kid probably had a whole lecture planned out, Steve thinks with amusement, and he wonders if he maybe should have been a little less compliant so that he’d have a chance to deliver it. But then his head gives a vicious throb and he tries to lean against the doorframe in a way that makes him look casual and not at all like he’s in pain.

He redirects his attention to Robin. “And how are you doing, newest member of the monster-fighting club?”

Robin shudders a little, looking like she isn’t quite ready to joke about it, which Steve supposes is fair. He’s had almost two years to get used to this new world where monsters exist, and she’s had less than twenty-four hours. “I’m fine,” she says unconvincingly. When Steve narrows his eyes at her, she repeats it more snappily: “I’m _fine._ ”

She isn’t, obviously, but before Steve has a chance to call her on it, Dustin speaks again.

“So…” he says, peering around Steve into the house. “Can we come in or what? You’re not being a very good host.”

“Didn’t we just spend, like, ten hours trapped in a Russian elevator together?” Steve asks, but there’s no real irritation in it, and even as he says it he’s moving back to let Dustin and Robin through. Truth be told, he’s glad to see them, glad not to be knocking around in this big empty house alone. He shuts the door behind them. “What more do you want from me?”

“We want you to watch a movie with us.”

It’s such an ordinary thing, so weirdly _mundane_ after yesterday, and the conviction with which Dustin says it startles a laugh out of Steve. “A movie?”

“Yeah,” says Dustin. He looks a little shy, suddenly, almost embarrassed. It isn’t a look Steve has seen on him very often. “I just wanted to, to do something, you know…”

“Something normal,” Robin supplies when he trails off. Steve meets her gaze over the top of Dustin’s head. She’s looking at him with that unnervingly direct expression of hers, but there’s something new in it, something a little bit haunted and a little bit hardened and a little bit vulnerable, too.

And fuck if he would ever deny them anything, this kid who he’s risked his life to protect multiple times now and his weird annoying brilliant coworker, especially after all the fresh trauma of the past few days. So he flashes Robin an easy smile and then turns the same expression to Dustin, and says, “Yeah, we can watch a movie. Anything particular in mind?”

“Star Wars,” Dustin says immediately.

“I don’t have Star Wars,” Steve says. He feels guilty about that, but only a little bit, because he isn’t a _nerd._ The kids haven’t ruined him that badly yet.

Dustin rolls his eyes. “Obviously, because you don’t have any _taste_ , but lucky for you, _I_ have it and I just happen to have brought it with me.” He plops down on Steve’s couch, then unzips his backpack to pull out a VHS tape with a tattered cover. “Here you go,” he says, presenting it to Steve as if it’s some kind of sacred and impressive object. “ _Return of the Jedi_.”

“Dude, that’s, like, objectively the worst one,” says Robin, but she’s laughing. Steve is laughing, too. Of course the little shit had come already armed with the movie he wanted to watch.

“Erica too cool for us now that we’ve escaped captivity?” Steve asks as Dustin shoves the tape into the VCR.

Dustin scoffs. “I’m sure _she_ thinks so. But really, you think her parents were going to let her out of their sight today? To go hang out with the same teenagers who just got her kidnapped by Russians?”

“They don’t know about the Russians,” Steve points out, but still, Dustin has a point. Really, he’s not sure how Dustin himself managed to escape from his own mother this morning.

Dustin settles back onto the couch between Steve and Robin, making himself comfortable. It’s obvious he’s seen this movie about a thousand times before because he won’t stop _talking,_ narrating everything the characters are doing as if Steve is both blind and deaf and has no ability of his own to figure out what’s going on. Robin interjects occasionally with commentary of her own and Steve ends up ignoring the movie entirely, content to just let their voices, so animated and _alive,_ wash over him like a palpable sense of relief. Eventually their chatting tapers off, and about an hour into the movie, Steve realizes that Dustin has dozed off, his head drooping onto Steve’s shoulder. This should be weird, he thinks, having a kid asleep on him while _Return of the Jedi_ plays in the background. But it isn’t weird at all. Instead, Steve just finds himself feeling disgustingly fond.

“Steve?” says Robin after a long time. The movie seems like it’s nearing some kind of conclusion. “Why did you walk home alone last night?”

The question makes his heart feel a little weird. “I don’t know. It just seemed like the thing to do, you know?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her turn to look up at him. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” He’s keeping his eyes carefully fixed to the television. “The kids had each other, and their parents when they showed up, and you had _your_ parents when _they_ showed up, and Mrs. Byers was so busy with everything, with what happened to Hopper, and she had to take care of El, and Nancy and Jonathan—” he swallows hard, the names sticking in his throat for some reason— “Nancy and Jonathan had each other, so, you know. I didn’t want to bother anyone. And I didn’t really think anyone would notice I left, honestly.”

Robin is silent for awhile before she answers. Then she says quietly, “I noticed.”

Steve isn’t sure what to say to that, and he also isn’t sure why it makes his heart go all soft, or why it makes him feel almost dangerously close to weeping suddenly. “Thanks, Robin,” he says, and lightly bumps his shoulder against hers.

—

He drives Dustin and Robin home around six, tossing both of their bikes in his trunk. Hawkins is safe now, supposedly, and it’s not that he doesn’t trust them, but he can’t help but feel a little uneasy about the idea of them biking around by themselves.

“Alright, Henderson,” he says as he pulls up in front of Dustin’s house. He cranes his neck to look at him in the rearview mirror. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

Dustin salutes at him for some reason, and opens the door. Before he can slide out, though, Steve stops him.

“Call if you need anything,” he tells Dustin firmly. “Seriously.”

Dustin looks a little confused at that. “Yeah, I know,” he says, and of course he does. He never _stops_ calling Steve when he needs something—usually just useless girl advice or a ride to the arcade because that’s all Steve is really good for, but still. He hasn’t stopped feeling oddly tender toward the kid all afternoon, and he doesn’t think it’s too irrational of him to be feeling a little extra protective today.

He smiles. “Yeah, I know you know.” And then, when Dustin lingers in the backseat, still looking at Steve a little funny: “Now get out of my car, shitbird, I have things to do.”

He waits while Dustin heaves his bike out of the trunk, and then lingers in the driveway, watching Dustin to make sure he gets into the house okay. Robin is watching him too, gazing out the window with an unreadable expression. She’s been quiet all afternoon, Steve’s noticed. After the first movie had ended and a heated argument started about what to watch next, she had participated, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it. It was like she was just going through the motions. And now, in the car, she’d hardly spoken a word.

Steve opens his mouth, unsure even as he does it whether he’s planning to ask if she’s alright or just ask for her address so he can take her home. Before he can say either, though, she turns back to him and says quietly, “You don’t actually have shit to do, do you? Because I don’t really want to go home. If that’s okay.”

She looks exhausted, Steve realizes, and way less composed than she did when Dustin was there. And he gets that, better than anyone probably. He understands well what it feels like to be barely holding it together but still having to be strong around the kids, because they’re so fucking young and have been through so much and the last thing they need is to see the adults fall apart on them. Robin’s young too, though. _He’s_ young. And anyway, he’s not sure how much age is actually advantage when it comes to processing supernatural trauma.

“I don’t have shit to do,” he tells her, and she looks relieved.

“Good,” she says. Then she adds, “That is a little sad, though.” There’s a hint of a smirk on her face as she says it.

“Give me a _break,_ ” says Steve, though he’s really just happy to see her smiling. “We just saved the _world_ last night, remember? Am I supposed to be off, like, taking some girl out to the movies tonight?”

“Well, only if the Hawk is good enough for you,” says Robin. “I heard the Starcourt theater burned down recently.”

Steve laughs. “Only if they’re playing whatever it was we saw last night. I would _love_ to find out how that ends.”

“I would love to find out how it _starts_ ,” says Robin. “And also everything that happened in the middle. I literally don’t remember a single thing.”

“The kid was about to bang his mom, remember?” says Steve. “And then…” But now that he really thinks about it, he realizes that he can’t actually remember a single other plot point, either. He’s pretty sure he remember the screen rotating at some point, and becoming three-dimensional, but that might have been the drugs. “Well, whatever. You wanna get some food?”

“Sounds great,” says Robin.

They end up at a crappy sandwich place a ways off Main, because it’s never crowded there and because it’s cheap and both of them have recently become unemployed. It occurs to him, after they’ve ordered at the counter and gone to sit down, that this is the first time they’ve ever actually hung out outside of work. When he mentions this to her, he raises her eyebrows at him. “Well,” he amends, “I guess being held hostage together was technically outside of Scoops. But that’s not _hanging out,_ Robin, or if that _is_ what you consider hanging out, then I might have to rethink this friendship.”

For a moment Robin looks surprised, as if she hadn’t expected Steve to call her his friend, but then her face clears. “What would everyone think,” she asks, “if they could see King Steve here, eating shitty sandwiches with Robin Buckley?”

“That I’ve fully fucking lost it, probably,” says Steve cheerfully.

“And you don’t care about that?” asks Robin. She says it lightly, as if she isn’t really concerned, but Steve can tell that she’s genuinely a little worried. He remembers suddenly that she’s in high school, still. All this bullshit that he’s finally escaped, finally learned to stop caring about—she’s still stuck right there in the middle of it. Despite her tough, punk exterior, and despite everything they’d confided in each other last night, Steve knows how hard it is not to care about all the high school shit that seems important.

“Not even a little bit,” he tells her firmly. And then he raises his voice and says, slightly sing-song, “Scoops Troop for _life,_ baby!”

“Oh my _god,_ ” laughs Robin. “You are such a dingus.”

Steve grins. “Yeah, but I’m _your_ dingus.”

—

Steve hasn’t touched his hair yet this morning.

That fact hadn’t seemed significant a few seconds ago. When he’d gone to answer the door, he was expecting to see Robin, or maybe Dustin, or any of the kids really, and he’s long since given up on the delusion that any of them actually think he’s cool.

He still kind of wants Nancy to think he’s cool.

It’s a stupid thought, completely absurd, given that she’s already seen him screaming like a child and covered in his own puke and concussed to hell and back, and also given that they broke up months ago, and she’s with Jonathan now, and he’s not even _jealous_ anymore.

Still, for some reason, it’s the only thought in his brain when he opens his front door to find her standing there.

“Steve, hi,” she says in that slightly breathy way she speaks when she’s a little bit uncertain but trying not to show it. Steve can see a few bruises and scrapes lining her exposed arms, and another just below her collar bone. Her hair is up in a loose ponytail and he remembers suddenly, uselessly, how annoyed she’d been after she cut her hair more than a year ago and for awhile it was too short to put up. _Never again,_ she’d huffed, pushing the loose strands out of her face in irritation. _I love this look, but it’s just not worth it._

“Hi,” he says, realizing that he’s just been staring at her for a little too long without speaking. “Hi, uh, hi. What are you—is everything okay?”

Because he and Nancy only really talk when the world is ending, these days, and there’s not much precedent for her just showing up on his doorstep. He thinks, if his stupid brain wasn’t so fixated on the messy state of his _stupid hair_ , there would be a little bit more room for anxiety over whatever new monster crisis Nancy’s come to drop on him.

“Yeah! Yeah, everything’s fine,” she says, and he’s a little bit relieved, but also not, because the lack of monsters doesn’t solve the hair problem, and, fuck, he doesn’t for the life of him know why that suddenly matters so much. It wasn’t as if his hair had been in great shape when she last saw him two days ago, having just emerged from Russian captivity. “I just, uh, wanted to check up on you.”

Steve wonders what it is about him that makes everyone feel so compelled to check up on him. He’s _fine—_ he’s a big boy and he knows how to take care of himself. But, with a little bit of embarrassment, he remembers how Hopper had shown up the next day after the tunnels and Billy and dragged him to a hospital, grumbling the whole time about how he was an enormous dumbass for not _telling_ any of them that his parents weren’t home, and how he couldn’t believe he’d had to find out from _Dustin Henderson_ that Steve was alone with a concussion, and, okay, maybe it makes sense that no one has any faith in him now.

And _Nancy_ coming to check up on him—Dustin he could have expected, and Robin made sense. It had been sweet of them to show up yesterday, but not surprising. Nancy didn’t have any obligations to him whatsoever, beyond the tenuous connection of ex-girlfriend and co-monster fighter. That he’d even crossed her mind is making him feel oddly warm, and that she’d actually _come over_ is almost overwhelming.

To be totally honest, he feels a little bit like his brain is short-circuiting.

“Steve?” says Nancy, and he snaps his attention back to her.

“Yeah, sorry. Sorry, what did you say?”

She’s looking at him a little funny. “Just that I hope you’ve been feeling okay? After the drugging and everything.”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” he tells her honestly. “Just a little sore.”

“Have you…” She looks a little hesitant to ask, like she knows it’s not her place anymore, and it isn’t, but she boldly finishes her sentence anyway because she’s Nancy Wheeler and that’s what she does. “Have you just been alone here?”

He knows what she’s asking: when is the last time he saw his parents? But he doesn’t feel like having that conversation right now, with her or anyone, so he just says, “No, Dustin and Robin came over yesterday and we hung out for awhile.”

A little furrow appears between her brows. “Robin,” she repeats.

 _She’s such a priss,_ Robin had said of Nancy the other day. Steve can kind of see that now, in the skeptical tone of voice and the slightly self-important way she’s raising her eyebrows. He wonders if maybe Nancy doesn’t like Robin. That seems incomprehensible to him, even though he himself had been calling Robin hyper and annoying just a few days ago.

“Yeah, Robin,” he says, a little bit defensively. “We’re friends.”

Then the weird, tense moment passes and Nancy smiles at him. “Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” she says, sounding genuine.

“Thanks, Nance,” he says. He falls into the nickname without thinking, like an easy old habit he never quite grew out of.

For some reason, it makes her smile falter a little bit. It doesn’t disappear, but it becomes a little bit fixed, and he thinks there’s something almost sad in her eyes. He doesn’t know what to make of that. Maybe he overstepped by calling her Nance. Do any of her friends call her that? He doesn’t know, he realizes. He’s really only ever been in her life as her boyfriend. They never really made an effort at staying friends, after everything. He thinks suddenly that maybe they should have.

He casts around for a new subject, anything to bring her smile back into more natural territory. He says the first thing he can think of. “Where’s Jonathan?”

If anything, though, Nancy looks even sadder at that. Steve would think she almost looked _guilty_ if he didn’t know better. “He’s at home, I think. I…” She trails off, but Steve knows what she was about to say: she didn’t want to bring Jonathan with in case it would upset Steve to see them together. Nancy Wheeler may have broken his heart, but for the most part, she’s also always been very good at keeping it safe.

“You should bring him along next time,” says Steve. He doesn’t know why he says it. It makes no sense at all; why would there be a _next time,_ now that Nancy’s accomplished her one-time mission of checking up on him? But he does know without a doubt that he’s being honest when he continues, “I’d like to see him. Tell him I say hi, will you?”

“Sure,” says Nancy. The smile is back now, and Steve returns it easily.

—

Usually the kids make him drive them around like their own personal chauffeur, but when Dustin asks if they can all just come over to Steve’s place, he doesn’t question it. He just picks up a bunch of snacks and straightens up the living room a little bit (as if they’re actual _company,_ Jesus Christ, when they’re really just a bunch of little gremlins who he knows are going to trash the place within four minutes of arrival anyway).

They somehow all show up at the same time despite having biked from five separate houses. He can hear them through the open window when they’re still half a block away, hollering and screeching at each other. There’s Mike’s distinct complaining voice, followed by a loud laugh from Lucas, and the scraping of ten wheels against the pavement.

He goes outside to stand on the front porch and watch as they crest the hill and come into sight. When they get to his yard, they dump their bikes carelessly in a heap, tumbling off unsteadily in all directions. It’s been only been a few days since the mall, and yet in spite of everything they still look like such _kids_ in this moment. It makes his heart swell with something like pride, as well as a deep, inexplicable sadness.

They’re loudly arguing with each other, probably about something stupid, and Steve doesn’t try to follow the conversation as he herds them into the house and throws a few bags of potato chips at them and warns them that _they’d better not break anything or he’d be calling their parents right away, and Mike doesn’t want his mom knowing he’s responsible for a two hundred dollar vase, does he?_

“Is that vase really two hundred dollars?” asks Dustin skeptically, eyeing the ugly old thing perched on a table behind the couch.

“No way that’s two hundred dollars,” Lucas dismisses. “That’s, like, thirty dollars. _Maximum_.”

“It _could_ be two hundred,” says Dustin. He looks wary, almost, like the vase might jump off the table and break itself. “What do you know about vases, anyway?”

And then they’re arguing about fucking _vase prices,_ of all things, and Steve tries to be annoyed by it, but really he’s just so relieved that they’re still acting like their normal selves that he could cry.

Max is quiet, though. He doesn’t notice it until they’ve been playing for awhile, the boys arguing loudly over whose turn it is on the Atari that Mike brought over, but she’s not joining in the chaos the way she usually does. She’s sitting all the way to one side of the couch with her knees drawn up to her chest, and she doesn’t look unhappy, exactly, but Steve’s not used to any version of her that isn’t bursting with energy, fluently swearing, and triumphantly stomping the boys in whatever game they’re playing.

“Hey, Max,” he calls over to her after a particularly loud bout of screaming quiets down a bit. “Come help me grab some stuff from the kitchen, will you? I can’t carry enough snacks by myself to satisfy these shitheads.”

She smiles slightly at the barb, which Steve takes as a victory. But when she follows him into the kitchen and Steve, instead of handing her a bag of chips, just gestures at the table for her to sit down, the smile turns into a bit of a scowl.

“That was a stupid trick,” she says, crossing her arms and remaining on her feet.

“Yeah, well, you fell for it,” Steve points out, and her scowl deepens.

He’s not quite sure how to approach her with this, if he’s being honest. She’s always been the strong one of his little band of infants, preferring to deal with things on her own rather than let him see her falter. She never calls him after nightmares like Dustin sometimes does, never fumblingly asks about panic attacks the way Lucas did once. Her only nod to their shared monster-fighting background was asking Steve to teach her how to swing a bat properly, which he did, at the school field on a chilly day last March. But she’s still just a kid, just like the rest of them, and she’s one of _his_ kids, and Steve can tell when she isn’t okay.

He sits down himself, and, after a dramatic huff, she follows suit. “I just wanted to, you know. See how you’re holding up.”

She regards him rather skeptically. “I’m fine,” she says.

“Never said you weren’t,” says Steve. “But you know it would be, like, completely fine and normal if you _weren’t_ fine. Right? And if you aren’t fine—not saying that’s the case, but _if_ —then talking about it might help, you know? And I know you’ve got all your annoying little friends,” he adds hurriedly, “and of course you can talk to them to. But—”

“I don’t want to talk to them,” Max interrupts. Then she flushes, as if she hadn’t meant to blurt that out. “Because I don’t need to talk to them,” she adds hurriedly, “because I’m _fine._ ”

“Okay, yeah, you’re fine,” says Steve. “I just—shit, Max, I’m just worried about you, okay? It was a lot, what happened, and then with Billy…”

Max is trying to glare at him, he thinks, but the effect is somewhat ruined by something fragile and hesitant in her expression. “I thought you didn’t care about Billy,” she says.

“Well, I—” She’s not wrong, exactly. He’s never _cared_ about Billy in the sense of liking him or empathizing with him or wishing him the best, but still, Billy was his classmate and his teammate and at the end of the day, even with all the shitty things he did, a young person who didn’t deserve to be possessed and then murdered by a monster from an alternate dimension. “We weren’t friends,” he says carefully, and Max huffs as if to say, _yeah, you think?_ “But it’s still hard when someone you know dies, and he was your br—I mean, he lived with you, and this affects your family and your home life and whatever, and I just—I want to make sure you’re okay.”

For a long time Max just looks at him, as if it’s taking her some time to sort through what he’s saying and how she wants to respond. Steve sees a range of emotions flash across her face, stubborn denial and resignation and maybe, maybe grief. Then she drops her gaze. “I really, really hated him,” she says quietly to her hands.

Steve lowers his voice to match hers. “I know.”

“And I…” She swallows hard. “I always kind of hoped, you know? That he would eventually turn into a good person. I wanted to be able to forgive him. But he was really shitty right up until the end, he died before he turned into a good person, so now I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive him.” She looks up at Steve and he can see tears in her eyes. “Does that make me a bad person?”

“You’re not a bad person,” says Steve softly. He’s glad she’s opening up a little bit, but he’s totally unprepared for this, he’s realizing. He’s never seen her cry before, and it twists his heart in a way that makes him a little worried he’s going to start crying himself. “Why would that make you a bad person?”

“Because it’s selfish!” says Max. “Because he’s _dead,_ and he was trying to _save us_ at the very end, and I’m _still_ angry at him, and I _still_ can’t forgive him, but then every time I _do_ feel sad about him I also feel so guilty, because how can I be a good person and also be sad about someone who made my mom’s life miserable and attacked Lucas and tried to kill you and—”

“Max,” Steve cuts her off. Her tears have started falling and he reaches out to wipe them away, a weirdly parental gesture that he performs without a single second thought. “It’s okay. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s okay.”

She looks up at him and nods, tries to smile a little, but the effort just makes her face crumple and then she’s fully sobbing, leaning forward to bury her face in her hands.

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees Lucas appear in the kitchen doorway, looking like his heart is breaking to see Max cry. Steve wonders if this is his first time seeing it, too. But he’s pretty sure the reason Max never opens up in front of them is that she doesn’t want an audience to her vulnerability, so he shakes his head slightly at Lucas, who nods his understanding and slips silently back to the living room.

He waits quietly while Max cries, feeling a little as if he should be doing something, or saying something, but he doesn’t know what. At least she’s not alone. None of these kids deserve to ever feel alone.

Eventually she raises her head again. “Sorry,” she mumbles, wiping at her eyes. “I didn’t mean to…you know.”

“Hey, it’s okay.” He thinks his heart might burst with the tenderness he feels toward her. He leans forward to pull her into his arms. “C’mere.”

For a few minutes she just leans against him, and then she straightens with little nod. “Okay,” she says, with an expression like she’s steeling herself for battle. Steve supposes that’s about what it must feel like, to be the only girl in this group of guys and to be so afraid showing any weakness to them. Not that any of them would ever think less of her—Lucas and Dustin both think the sun shines out her ass, and he knows that even Mike and Will have grown to love her despite all the tension in the beginning, even if Mike would never admit it.

Steve holds out a hand to pull her to her feet. ‘We’d better get them their snacks, huh?”

“Yeah,” says Max with a tiny smile. She grabs a bag of chips from the counter and heads in the direction of the living room. Then she stops and looks back at Steve. “Thanks,” she says quietly.

“Any time,” he tells her. He means that.

The boys have given up on their game by the time Steve and Max return to the living room. The _game over_ screen is flashing on the TV still, but none of them are paying attention to it. Instead Lucas and Will have taken over the couch, and Mike and Dustin are sitting cross-legged on the carpet, facing them.

“I don’t know what to do,” Mike is saying quietly. There’s an edge of frustration to his voice, but he mostly just sounds sad. “How am I supposed to be there for her if she won’t even let me see her?”

“It’s not just you,” Will says. His voice is equally somber. “She won’t talk to me either, or Jonathan, or even Mom most of the time. She spends most of her time just sleeping on the couch. I mean, she’s always quiet, but this—” He breaks off, looking troubled. “I’m worried about her.”

They all look up as Steve and Max come into the room. Steve knows that they can tell Max has been crying—they all obviously heard her, and he can see the way their eyes soften with concern at the sight of her slightly puffy face—but none of them say anything about it. Lucas just pats the space next to him on the couch and Max, looking incredibly grateful for the lack of interrogation, goes and sits down a little closer to him than Steve thinks she probably would normally. Lucas takes her hand. It’s such a subtly sweet gesture that Steve thinks, not for the first time, that he might just fall to pieces at how very grown up these kids can be sometimes.

But in this particular group, _he’s_ the real grownup, which he’s reminded of by the way all five of them are looking at him rather expectantly, like they’re waiting for him to start spouting some comforting wisdom. He feels like he’s just used up whatever comforting wisdom he might have had on Max, but pseudo-adopting a bunch of children means having to be wise on demand, he supposes, so he sighs and sits down on the arm of the couch.

“El will be okay,” he says with more confidence than he feels. “Just give her time.”

Mike nods, looking miserable.

“I never thought Hopper would die,” says Lucas softly. “He always seemed so…”

“Invincible,” Steve finishes when Lucas trails off. “I know.” He turns to Will. “How is your mom doing? She and Hopper were pretty close, right?”

He shrugs. “She acts like she’s fine,” he says. “She always does. Especially now that there’s El to take care of too.”

“And…” He’s a little nervous about asking, for some reason, but he forces himself to finish the sentence. It almost feels like he’s saying something taboo. “Jonathan?”

“He’s okay,” says Will. “He’s got Nancy.” Then he seems to realize what he’s said, and looks at Steve apologetically.

Steve doesn’t mind, though. He’s just glad that Jonathan has someone who makes him so happy. Jonathan deserves that, he thinks. He and Nancy both do.

And there it is, suddenly, a flare of that warmth he’d felt when thinking about Nancy the other night, and then again yesterday when she was on his doorstep, that warmth that didn’t go away when he remembered she was with Jonathan now. It’s a good feeling, hot and bright, like thinking about the two of them is nourishing him somehow. He tries to remember what it used to feel like when he thought of them together, that cold, sick jealousy. He can’t imagine it at all. It’s like the warmth has always been there.

He isn’t sure what to do with that thought, so he tucks it away for later and turns his attention back to the kids.

—

Robin has been around pretty much constantly since the mall. It hasn’t even been a week, but this is already the third time he’s made her breakfast. He doesn’t mind. It’s nice, having her around. It occurs to him as he’s standing at the stove flipping pancakes while she sits at his kitchen table, extremely not contributing, that somewhere between the ice cream slinging and the Russian escaping and the monster fighting, she’s become his best friend. He tells her so.

She looks up at him, a little surprised. “You getting sappy on me, dingus?” she says, but her smile gives her away. Though she doesn’t say it back, he can tell that she feels the same.

“What’s with all the ‘dingus’?” he asks as he gracelessly shoves a plate of pancakes in front of her and sits down on the opposite side of the table. “You’d be, like, totally dead in a secret Russian basement without me.”

“Without Dustin and Erica, you mean,” says Robin. “I’m pretty sure you were unconscious for about sixty percent of the time we spent down there.”

“ _Excuse_ me,” Steve says, feigning offense as Robin smugly shoves a forkful of pancake into her mouth. “Which one of us took out a giant Russian, again?”

Robin swallows. “Oh, that’s right—that brought your fistfight win record up to, what, one in four?”

He wants to lob a bit of food at her, but then he would get syrup all over his hands, so he decides against it. Instead he just reaches his foot out to kick her under the table. “Hey, be fair. One in three, at least.”

“One in three? Oh, does this mean we’re finally admitting that your fight with Jonathan did count?”

“ _No,_ ” says Steve, “it didn’t count, because...” But he can’t think of a reason fast enough, and Robin smirks at him, triumphant.

“Ooh, you must be real embarrassed about losing that one,” she says. “You’re _blushing,_ Harrington.”

Is he? His face is a little warm, he realizes. He guesses he must be embarrassed, in some deep-seated, long-forgotten way. It had certainly wounded his pride that day.

“So,” says Robin, sitting back in her chair, “what’s the deal there, anyway? With the whole you-Nancy-Jonathan thing.”

The question makes his mouth run dry. Why would she ask that—can she tell, possibly, how much he’s been thinking about Nancy these past few days? How starstruck he was when Nancy showed up at his house? Does she know about the mysterious warmth in his stomach when he thinks about Jonathan? “What do you mean, the whole me-Nancy-Jonathan thing?”

“Come on, Steve. She’s your ex and he famously beat you up two years ago and now they’re dating each other and all three of you somehow ended up a part of this weird little monster-fighting club together. There’s gotta be a story there.”

“I don’t know, Robs,” says Steve, rolling his eyes, relieved beyond measure that that’s all she meant. “You pretty much just covered all of it. There’s not much more to tell.”

“ _Steeeve,_ ” she wheedles, and fuck, she’s amazing at the puppy-dog eyes. It’s like he’s gained yet another five-year-old to look after. Except he was kidnapped and tortured by Russians with this particular five-year-old, and she also happens to be his best friend in the world, which makes it especially hard to say no to her.

So he heaves a deep sigh that he doesn’t really mean and starts narrating, in a fragmented, circuitous sort of way as he keeps forgetting bits and looping back to them, all the places his life has intersected with Nancy’s and Jonathan’s over the past two years. She already knows the general outline—he’s been slowly filling her in these past few days, trying to make up for how out of the loop she must feel being thrown into this mess two years later than the rest of them—but he knows it’s the details she wants, so he tries to make the story as rich and entertaining as possible.

But when he gets to the part about that night at Tina’s party, and Nancy spitting drunkenly that she didn’t love him, he falters.

Robin is looking at him with big, soft eyes. “Jesus,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry, man.”

He shrugs. “It’s…okay. It’s okay.” It’s the same thing he told Nancy all those months ago, and at the time he’d been trying so hard to convince himself that it was true. Even now he’s not so sure. He’d _been_ sure, for awhile now, but these past few days it’s felt almost like it did last winter—he can’t stop thinking about Nancy’s warm smile, her soft hands, her terrifying, breathtaking glare.

Then—“Fuck Nancy,” Robin says in disgust, and Steve finds himself jumping to her defense.

“No, no, no,” he says quickly, “it’s not her fault. I was a shitty boyfriend, Robin, really. And I’m not in love with her anymore. And she and Jonathan are good for each other.”

“You’re not mad at her,” she says skeptically.

“No, I’m not.”

“Or at Jonathan?”

He looks at her in disbelief. How could he ever be mad at _Jonathan?_ Jonathan, who is such a good brother to Will, to all the kids really, who is so brave in the midst of crisis, who makes Nancy so happy. “No,” he says, “I’m not mad at Jonathan.”

Robin looks impressed, almost. “Well. You’ve certainly come a long way since you tried to beat him up when you thought he was into Nancy.”

Steve considers this. He _has_ come a long way, he thinks. He never would have imagined, last November, that he would reach a point where thinking about the two of them could make him genuinely happy. He supposes this must be what personal growth feels like.

Then Robin smirks and says, “Key word being _tried,_ since I do seem to remember Jonathan absolutely _trouncing_ you—”

This time he doesn’t hesitate to throw a bit of pancake at her face, even though it makes his fingers sticky and gross. ****

—

“Tell me about him,” says Robin on their way to Hopper’s funeral.

The question makes Steve’s heart ache. He hadn’t been close to the chief, not really, not the way some of the kids seemed to be and certainly nowhere near the way El was. Still—Lucas had been right the other day, when he said that Hopper never seemed like he could die. He was always such a solid, comforting presence, even when he was being an asshole, which was pretty much always. Steve always felt like things would turn out okay, once Hopper showed up. He knows the others felt the same.

“You saw him around Hawkins sometimes, right? Like, before?”

Robin nods. “He always seemed pissed about something,” she says. “Like he really, really didn’t want to be doing his job. I mean—” She looks guilty suddenly. “Is that a horrible thing to say about him? I’m sure he was a really great person, just, I never really _met_ him, and that was my impression—”

“Robin,” Steve cuts her off with a slight laugh. “It’s fine. He was pretty grumpy, like, _all_ the time. But he was also one of those people who was…I don’t know, like, soft on the inside or whatever.” ****

“I can see that,” she says.

Steve thinks of the look on Hopper’s face when he’d shown up at his house last year to take him to the hospital—all tired and gruff and annoyed but protective, too, like he genuinely cared. Steve doesn’t like to admit, even to himself, how much that day had meant to him. It had been a long time since either of his parents had really been around, and then there was Hopper, who had no obligations to Steve whatsoever, not only taking him to the hospital but staying there with him through the checkup and taking him by the pharmacy afterwards and dropping him off at home that night with strict orders to call if he needed anything. Steve hadn’t ever called, of course. But knowing that he _could_ if he needed to had made him so grateful that, after he watched through the window as Hopper drove away, he’d begun to cry.

“He would come check on me sometimes,” Steve tells her quietly. “He didn’t actually talk to me or anything, but—I would see him drive by my house sometimes. He always slowed down a little bit like he was looking in the windows to make sure things seemed normal. He never used to do that, before everything.”

“It’s funny,” Robin muses, “to think of him hiding El for so long. I would never have guessed he had a secret kid at home.”

“Wasn’t funny at the time,” says Steve. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the look on Mike’s face when he’d realized Hopper had been lying to him, or the way they could all hear Mike screaming at Hopper in one of the bedrooms afterwards.

But over the past year, it’s become natural to think of El and Hopper together. He hadn’t seen them much. There had just been a few times when Steve had driven all the little twerps out to the cabin to see El, and he never stayed long himself. But any idiot could have seen how much softer Hopper was around her, how much kinder, how deeply he obviously loved her. Robin had seen it too, at the mall, when Hopper had so gently wrapped her leg and then held her cradled to his chest with her hand clasped in his.

“He didn’t deserve to die,” says Robin softly.

“No,” says Steve. “He didn’t.”

—

He wants more than anything to skip the luncheon after the funeral. The service itself had been bad enough, and it’s somehow even worse in this stuffy little room in the church where everyone looks so miserable as they pick at their finger foods. El is sitting at a table on the other side of the room, staring down at the untouched plate that Mrs. Byers must have set down in front of her. He realizes suddenly that she’s wearing the dress that Nancy had worn to Will’s funeral, and it surprises him a bit that he remembers such a little detail like that.

On the other hand, though, it doesn’t surprise him at all. Every detail about Nancy Wheeler has always been worth remembering.

He cranes his neck, trying to find Robin in the crowd. She’d disappeared from his side a few minutes back and now he’s standing alone, sweating through his suit and trying not to think too hard about the look on El’s face even as he wonders if he should go to her. He decides against it, and tells himself that he’s respecting an unspoken wish for solitude rather than just being a coward.

He spots Robin leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the room, talking quietly to Dustin and Erica. The sight makes him smile slightly to himself in spite of everything. As if she can sense that he’s watching her, Robin looks up and meets his gaze. She flashes a small, sad smile back at him.

He’s about to go cross the room to join her when he’s stopped by a warm hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” says a voice just behind him, and Steve knows without looking who it is. He would know that voice anywhere—that voice that he’s come to associate with strength and safety, somehow, even though he usually only hears it when he and everyone he loves are in very real danger of dying.

He turns to face Jonathan. “Hey,” he says back. Jonathan is wearing a black suit with a tie, and it occurs to Steve that he’s never seen him look this nice except at funerals. It also occurs to him that he and Jonathan Byers have been to far too many funerals together.

And under the suit, Jonathan looks exhausted. There are deep bags under his eyes and his cheeks are sunken, too, as if he hasn’t been eating enough. It’s only been a week since Steve last saw him, leaning against Nancy in the back of an ambulance, and it’s not as if Jonathan had looked fantastic then, either, but now he seems as if he’s aged about ten years. Steve supposes that makes sense, given everything. He can’t imagine what it’s been like for him at home, with his mom to take care of now El, too. Not to mention his own grief. Steve wishes, suddenly, that there was something he could do to make things better for Jonathan—wishes he could just pull Jonathan into his arms, tuck Jonathan’s head against his shoulder, hold him tight until the pain passes. Jonathan deserves that, Steve thinks. He deserves someone to look after him.

Though, that’s Nancy’s job now, he supposes.

“Thanks for coming,” says Jonathan quietly.

The acknowledgement surprises Steve. Of course he came; had Jonathan really thought he wouldn’t? He says as much, trying to keep his voice light.

“No, that’s not what I meant, I just—” Jonathan swallows hard, looking nervous for some reason. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Steve tries to smile at him, but the words make his heart feel inexplicably tight. After a moment of confused silence, he manages, “It’s the least I could do. For Hopper,” he clarifies, when Jonathan looks confused. “After, you know, everything…I feel like I’m in debt to him, now, or something.”

Jonathan blows out a long, slow breath. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” he says. Then, more quietly, “He was always good to us. To Mom and Will especially. He never missed a single one of Will’s doctor’s appointments after he came back, did you know that?”

Steve didn’t know that. He thinks of the chief, tall and gruff and downright terrifying when he wanted to be, squashed into a molded plastic chair in the corner of some doctor’s office with Mrs. Byers and Will. Two years ago, the image would have made him laugh; now, it just seems natural, like Hopper was always meant to be looking out for these kids.

“And when Will was…when we thought Will was, you know, before we knew he was in the Upside Down. He went to the morgue with us to see him. Talked to me in the lobby while I waited for my mom to come out, told me she was strong. He…” Jonathan sighs, a heavy, weary sound that makes Steve’s heart ache. “I don’t know. He was a good man.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, and then before he can say anything else, Nancy approaches. She reaches for Jonathan’s hand and holds it in both of her own.

“Hey,” she says quietly. Steve and Jonathan murmur it back.

Then the three of them are quiet. Steve is intensely aware of the fact that both Nancy and Jonathan are looking at him, looking up at him with big, solemn eyes, and fuck, he wishes he could pull _both_ of them into his arms. He would do anything, he thinks, to smooth away the grief on their faces. Standing here across from them, he thinks of the last funeral they attended together—Barb’s last year, the one that came a year too late. All three of them had been wearing exactly the clothes that they’re wearing now. And Steve had stood next to them, trying not to shiver in all the empty space around him while his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend held hands a few feet away. The cold is what he remembers most, both the chill in the air and the frigid feeling in his stomach, in his chest, in his _bones_ at the thought of the two of them together.

Now it’s like they’re casting some of their warmth over him, even though nothing has really changed since last November. And maybe, Steve thinks, he wants to be held by them as much has he wants to hold them. Just to get a little bit closer to that warmth.

And then suddenly it’s too much, standing there with them. “I’m gonna go check on Dustin,” he tells them, and leaves before their suffocating warmth can completely overwhelm him. ****

—

Steve knows as soon as he wakes up what kind of day it’s going to be. There’s a tight feeling in his chest, crawling almost up to his throat like maybe he’s congested, but he knows that he isn’t congested. He’s just—he gets like this, sometimes; at least, he’s been getting like this ever since that day at Jonathan’s house when he found out that monsters are real. Gets this aching in his chest and a splitting headache to accompany it and a complete lack of motivation to even roll over to make himself more comfortable, much less get out of bed entirely.

The annoying thing is that he’s been _fine_ since it happened. He’s been sore, sure, from his injuries, and sad about Hopper, and worried about the kids, and a little on edge. But he hasn’t been having nightmares the way he did the last two Novembers. He hasn’t had any panic attacks, or sudden, awful bouts of crying. And yet here he is now, totally without warning, feeling every bit as shitty as he did on the worst days last fall.

The doorbell buzzes, sending a sickening jolt of panic through him before his brain can process what the sound is. Then, heart pounding with adrenaline, he glances over at his alarm clock and groans. It’s after ten. Which means that Robin’s here, because she’s here pretty much every morning now, and normally Steve doesn’t mind that—having out with Robin is the happiest he’s been in a very long time—but right now the thought of the energy it will take to drag himself out of bed, get dressed, go downstairs, and _entertain_ her is enough to put him on the verge of tears. ****

Still, if only because he knows she’ll break down his front door if he doesn’t answer, he forces himself to roll out of bed, and fumbles for a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants to put on. When he finally makes it down the stairs, she’s started pounding continuously on the door. The noise certainly isn’t helping his headache any.

He opens the door to find Robin with her hand still raised, about to knock again. It hovers in midair for a moment before she drops it. “Did you forget I was coming over, asshole?” she says.

Her tone is light, playful, and Steve knows that she’s just messing around because that’s what they do together, how the two of them show affection. He _knows_ this. But today, for some reason, her words cause a hot flair of annoyance. “I didn’t even invite you,” he snaps.

He regrets it the moment it leaves his mouth. His tone is much too sharp to be joking the way Robin is, and he doesn’t miss the hurt that flashes across her face before she reworks her expression into one of scorn. “No, I guess you didn’t,” she says coolly. But then as she looks at him, she draws her eyebrows together and uncrosses her arms. “You look like shit, Steve.”

He pauses for much too long before saying, tensely, “I’m fine.”

“Don’t fucking _lie_ to me.” She sounds angry, but she mostly just looks concerned as she easily sidesteps Steve to go into the house. She looks him up and down, taking in his rumpled t-shirt, the sweatpants, the unstyled hair. “Dude, you’re shaking. What’s going on?”

Is he? He glances down at his own hands and realizes with a start that they’re trembling. He fumbles for an excuse but his mind feels slow, sluggish, and before he can think of anything Robin’s hand is on his back and she’s practically pushing him towards the living room. Too tired to protest, he lets her sit him down on the couch, and though moments ago he’d wished she would just leave, he can’t help but feel a little relieved by the warmth that radiates from her as she sits down beside him.

For a long moment, neither of them speak.

Then Robin asks quietly, “You want to talk about it?”

 _Talk about what?_ Steve wants to say, because he hasn’t even admitted to her that anything’s wrong. But when he meets her eyes, he knows that she understands without him having to tell her. She gets it, and she’s not judging him, and she’s willing to talk about it. Totally against his will, he feels tears spring to his eyes.

He wonders, suddenly, if this is how Nancy felt all those times last year. If she felt the same way Steve does now—and fuck, of course she did, of course, because she went through everything he did and more, and lost her best friend in the process. He feels so fucking stupid, suddenly. Because he hadn’t wanted to talk about it then, hadn’t wanted to admit it was real. But now that Robin is offering to listen, and now that he can feel her gentle hand rubbing up and down his arm, he realizes just how desperately he needs this. And Nancy had needed it, too—had been smart enough to _admit_ she needed it, unlike Steve—and he had refused to give it to her.

“You don’t have to,” says Robin, her voice still more gentle than Steve has ever heard it. “But, you know, I was there too. I _get_ it, Steve. I mean, I don’t have as much, like, accumulated trauma as you do, but—the stuff with the mall, I understand what you’re going through. You know?”

“Yeah.” His voice comes out choked, gravelly, and he swipes at a few escaped tears with the heel of his palm. “Fuck, sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

Robin interrupts him by scooting closer and wrapping both of her arms around one of his, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Yesterday,” she says after a little while, “I was in the car with my mom and she was speeding a little bit and I, like, freaked the fuck out. Yelled at her to slow down. It felt too much like that fucking golf cart. And she laughed at me and drove faster, because she wasn’t even speeding that much at all, and I was being ridiculous. And it’s not her fault, because she obviously has no idea. But it took me all day to calm down after that.”

Steve takes a deep breath. “You know about the whole thing with the Christmas lights, right?” He feels her nod against his shoulder. “The last two Christmases I was just constantly freaked out because of the blinking lights up everywhere.”

“God, we’re so fucked up,” says Robin calmly, bluntly, and it startles a slightly teary laugh out of him. He wants to put his arm around her but she’s got it trapped, so instead he leans his head down to rest his cheek against her hair.

“Yeah,” he agrees a little shakily. “We really are.”

Then the doorbell rings, and both of them startle so badly that they spring apart.

“ _Jesus,_ ” hisses Robin. Then she runs her eyes over Steve, who supposes he looks even more of a mess now that his eyes are red and puffy and he’s got tear tracks on his face. “Let’s just ignore it.”

Steve wants to agree, but the doorbell rings again, and then half a dozen more times in quick succession. He groans. “It’s probably the kids.”

“Oh.” They both know that the kids aren’t going to leave without an explanation, especially since they’ve definitely noticed Steve’s car in the driveway and Robin’s bike by the porch. “I can just…tell them you’re not feeling up for it? Or that you’re, like, busy or something?”

He sighs and heaves himself up from the couch. “No, it’s fine. The little shits are a good distraction, at least.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m—” The doorbell buzzes again, and he shouts toward the front door, “Jesus fuck, I’m _coming!”_

He wipes his eyes one last time before opening the door, but even so, Dustin immediately frowns. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” says Steve airily, and though he knows he doesn’t look it, he finds that he does mean it—he feels lighter now, and strangely calm. “What do you shitheads want?”

The shitheads, it turns out, want a ride to the pool, not the perfectly good one within easy biking distance but the one in the next town over, which Steve is pretty sure is basically identical. When he tries to tell them this, he’s shouted down by a loud chorus of explanations that he doesn’t bother paying attention to.

“Jesus Christ, fine, I’ll take you to the pool,” he says, making a show of reluctance even though he knows they know he was always going to cave no matter what. They cheer, and Robin rolls her eyes, looking amused and a little fond, and Steve has to make an effort not to smile.

Only five of the kids are there, though. A few minutes later, as they’re heading out to Steve’s car, he speaks quietly to Will.

“How is El doing? I haven’t seen her since the funeral.”

Will shrugs. “You know.”

It’s not really an answer, but Steve does know. He imagines El curled up on the Byers’ couch, maybe dully picking at a plate of food, maybe watching TV with a glazed-over expression. She’s always been by far the quietest of the bunch but no less full of life, and his heart twists to think of her like that.

He thinks of how much of a relief it had been this morning when Robin showed up unexpectedly and helped him through his trauma, or his depression, or whatever the fuck it was. He was never a good enough boyfriend to do that for Nancy. Maybe, he thinks, he should be a good enough babysitter to try to do it for El. ****

—

It’s funny, going to the Byers’ house in the summertime. He’s been there in warm weather before, of course—he hasn’t had a choice, seeing as he’s basically just a glorified valet to all the little goblins—but even so, he always expects to find it the way it looked last November and the November before: dead leaves, harsh wind, crackling grey grass. He wonders if that’s a trauma thing. Maybe he should ask Robin about it; it seems like something she’d know. Most things seem like something she’d know, honestly.

Jonathan’s car is parked in front, which makes his heart do a funny little flip in his chest—it almost feels like surprise, even though he’d fully expected Jonathan to be home. Jonathan’s as unemployed as he himself is, these days, and he knows even without having asked that Jonathan is reluctant to leave his mom or his brother alone right now. Or his sister, Steve supposes. According to the kids, El’s stay is looking pretty permanent.

Mrs. Byers looks surprised to see him, though not unhappy. “Steve!” she says when she opens the door to see him there. “I didn’t know Will was—Will!” she calls, turning her head to shout back into the house. “Steve’s here!” Then she turns back to Steve. “Are none of the others with you?”

“Oh—” Steve peers around her to where Will has come into sight, looking confused. He gives the kid a smile. “I’m not here to pick up Will, actually.” He wonders if he should find it annoying, or maybe a little insulting, that Mrs. Byers has assumed the only reason he would be at her house is to ferry around a bunch of ten-year-olds. Instead, his heart just swells a bit with something like pride at the knowledge that he’s become such a fixture in the kids’ lives. “I was hoping to see El, actually. Just to see how she’s doing. I haven’t really seen her since…you know.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Byers’ smile falters a bit. “Oh, honey, I don’t know if…well, I’ll go see if she’s feeling up for any visitors right now. It would be good for her to see you.” She steps back, beckoning Steve into the house. “I’ll be right back.”

Steve watches Mrs. Byers disappear down the hallway and knock on what he knows to be Will’s door. Then she goes into the room, shutting the door behind her, and Steve waits for several long seconds but she doesn’t emerge again.

“Don’t take it personally if she doesn’t want to see you,” says Will from behind him. “She barely talks to any of us either, and she _still_ won’t see Mike.”

“Damn,” says Steve quietly. He’d already known that, but the way Will says it—all sad and resigned—makes his heart hurt even more.

A door opens and he turns, expecting to see Mrs. Byers, hopefully with El in tow. Instead it’s Jonathan, emerging from his own bedroom, and though Steve had known he would be home, seeing him so suddenly sends a jolt through him. It feels almost as if he’s stuck is finger in an outlet—or rather, someone _else_ jammed his finger into an outlet when he wasn’t paying attention. _This is absurd,_ he thinks to himself a little angrily. Because why the fuck, after everything they’ve been through together, should he still feel nervous around Jonathan Byers? Why would anyone _ever_ feel nervous around Jonathan Byers? It isn’t as if he has to worry about Jonathan stealing his girlfriend anymore. The worst has already happened.

Jonathan doesn’t seem to notice him at first. He looks a little absent, wandering down the hall towards the kitchen. Watching him, Steve feels his mouth run dry. The last time he’d seen Jonathan, he was wearing a suit that, objectively, looked nice on him. Now Jonathan’s wearing thin, ratty-looking pajama pants and a t-shirt that hangs loosely off his shoulders and his feet are bare, which for some reason Steve is fixating on. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Jonathan barefoot before. He _knows,_ actually, that he’s never seen Jonathan barefoot before, because he’s only seen Jonathan at school or at funerals or at the end of the world. This isn’t any of those things. This is just Jonathan in his own monster-free house on a regular Thursday morning, going to the kitchen to make himself a bowl of cereal or something, probably.

“ _Steve,_ ” says Will in a rather pointed way, and Steve realizes at that moment that he’s just standing there _gaping_ at Jonathan like a complete idiot, but before he has time to do anything about it Jonathan turns, startled by his brother’s voice, and then sees Steve and goes bright red in a way that would, under different circumstances, make Steve burst out laughing.

But these aren’t different circumstances. These are _these_ circumstances, so instead of laughing, Steve just watches with an inexplicable combination of dread and excitement as Jonathan fumbles to form words. “Steve—what—is everything—” Then he shakes himself and says almost defensively, “What’s up, man?” In the few seconds since he noticed Steve, Jonathan’s demeanor has gone from loose and relaxed to tense, wary, and a little aggressive, almost as if Steve is a threat he needs to fight off. It’s so drastically different than the way he’d acted around Steve at the funeral, and he can’t help but feel a little hurt—more than a little—and wonder what in the world he could have done wrong.

Will is looking incredulously back and forth between the two of them. “Yeah,” he echoes, fixing Steve with a very clear _you’d-better-explain-this-later_ look, “what’s up, _man?_ ”

“I was just—” Humiliatingly, his voice comes out gravelly and strangled-sounding, and he clears his throat. “I just came by to see El. Just to make sure she’s okay.”

Jonathan opens his mouth to respond, but at that moment Mrs. Byers comes back into the kitchen. “She’s napping right now,” she tells Steve in one of the most transparent lies he’s ever seen. Even ignoring the fact that it’s only ten in the morning, it wouldn’t make any sense for Mrs. Byers to have spent so long in El’s room if she was actually asleep.

Steve takes it at face value, though. He’s not going to push the poor kid. “Well, tell her I said hi, okay?”

Mrs. Byers gives him a sad smile. “I will. She’ll be glad to know you stopped by.” Then she turns to Jonathan. “Could you stop by the cabin again today to pick up the rest of her clothes? She can’t keep wearing those same two shirts forever. I’d do it, but…” A look of pain clouds her eyes and Steve remembers, suddenly, that she was close to Hopper too. Was probably in love with him, according to Dustin. He keeps forgetting that, somehow. “Well, I have to get to work pretty soon.”

Then the rest of what she’s said catches up to him. “Wait,” he says to Jonathan, “you’ve been back to the cabin?”

Jonathan looks caught off-guard by the question, and a little wary, as if it might be a trick somehow. “Yes? El needed some stuff.”

Steve imagines Jonathan looking through El’s things, picking out shirts for her and packing them carefully into a box to take back with him. He imagines Jonathan hesitating over each one, running through everything he knows about El and trying to decide what she’d most want him to bring her. Looking at some of Hopper’s things, and wondering if he should bring those back too, and then deciding against it because he knows it’s too soon for El and his mom to be confronted with that, because he just _knows_ those things, has always been so intuitive about other people’s emotions. The way he was with Nancy, when he knew exactly what it was she needed—exactly what it was that Steve couldn’t give her.

“It’s a real mess over there,” Jonathan is saying quietly, and Steve forces himself back to the present moment. Will has wandered off and Joyce has her back turned, rummaging in a cabinet, and Steve realizes that Jonathan is speaking to him specifically. “I guess you didn’t see it that night—there’s holes in the ceiling and everything. I’ve been meaning to try and fix it up, so all the stuff in there doesn’t get ruined, you know, in case El wants any of it eventually, but with everything…” He sighs. “There just hasn’t been time.”

“I’ll help you,” Steve offers. He says it completely without thinking, but as soon as his brain catches up, he knows that he means it—he would be more than happy to help Jonathan nail plywood over some holes, or something. Anything he can do to help El out. Anything he can do to help Jonathan out, too, because Jonathan always has too much on his plate and if Steve could just take some of that burden away, he thinks it would be about the most satisfying thing he’s ever done.

Jonathan looks surprised. “Really?”

“Yeah, of course I’ll help. Just let me know when. It’s not like I have a job to be at or anything.”

That makes Jonathan smile a little bit. It’s the first smile Steve has seen from him all morning—actually, he realizes, it’s the first smile he’s seen in he doesn’t know how many months. For some reason, it feels suddenly very significant that he can’t place the last time he saw Jonathan smile.

However long it’s been—this one looks nice on him.

“Of course I’ll help,” he says again.

—

Robin is lying on her back on on the floor of Steve’s bedroom, her feet propped up against his bed. She’s got a book held up above her face—“Summer reading,” she’d told Steve, and he’d laughed incredulously at the realization that her life still included things like _homework_ —but he can tell she’s not really reading it. She hasn’t turned a page in ages. He wonders why she doesn’t just give up the act and put the book down; her arms must be killing her, holding it up like that for so long.

Steve isn’t doing anything in particular, just lounging on his bed and occasionally poking one of Robin’s feet to prompt an indignant squawk and a snappy _knock it off, dingus, can’t you see I’m working?_ He knows he should be doing something—scouring the papers for job openings, trying to think of a birthday present for Lucas, _anything_ —but every time he tries to start a task his mind immediately shuts down and latches back onto what has been his sole object of attention for the past several days. This must be what _wallowing_ is, he thinks. The thing is, he’s not even sad. He doesn’t know _what_ he is, and he’s pretty sure that’s a big part of the problem.

“Alright, dingus,” sighs Robin, tossing her book dramatically to the side, “spit it out.”

The sudden break in the silence startles him. “Spit what out?”

She pulls her feet off the bed and sits up just in time for him to catch her eye roll. “Whatever it is that’s making you gaze out the window and sigh like a Victorian girl pining after her unrequited love.”

“I’m not _sighing_ ,” he tells her. “Or _pining._ ”

“Steve,” says Robin.

For a long moment, he just looks at her. He’s pretty sure Robin would never judge him, not after everything they went through together and considering he already knows _her_ biggest secret, but he doesn’t want to say it out loud. He isn’t even quite sure what he would be saying.

“ _Steve,_ ” Robin says again. “Come on. You’ve been acting weird for days.”

 _You mean, since we were almost murdered by evil Russians and supernatural flesh monsters?_ he wants to say, because that seems like it should definitely count as a cover for acting weird. But Robin is smart enough to know the difference between trauma and whatever the hell it is he’s feeling now, so he doesn’t bother with trying to lie to her. He takes a deep breath. “I can’t stop thinking about Nancy,” he admits. “Is that crazy?”

Robin’s face had been carefree, teasing, but now she looks sharply up at him. “A little,” she says warily.

“I just—” He looks away from her, out the window, as if that’ll somehow help him organize his thoughts. “I don’t know. It’s stupid. I just, I can’t get her out of my head, it’s like after she first broke up with me, except this is different, it’s not…I don’t know. This is so stupid.” He picks at a lose thread in his quilt. “I’m just being stupid,” he reiterates, this time with more conviction. “Ignore me, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just all mixed up, I guess, with everything.”

But Robin doesn’t look like she’s going to ignore him. Instead she looks a little puzzled, a little troubled, and, if he’s not mistaken, a little sympathetic. When she speaks, her voice is soft, careful.

“Are you in love with her still?”

He isn’t sure what did it, exactly. His memories of that night range from hopelessly foggy to hauntingly clear and it’s hard to pick out the exact moment when it had dawned on him that he was still in love with Nancy Wheeler. Maybe it was when he’d watched her talking to Murray with so much confidence, or her earnest voice when she’d said _yes, exactly_ to his questions about the flesh monster, or when she’d handed El that drink and then leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead with all the gentleness in the world. Maybe it had been that moment, that one he can’t quite remember properly, when he’d seen Billy speeding toward her and known instantly that there was nothing he could do but get her out of harm’s way. The thought of losing her had, in that moment, been an all-consuming source of panic.

Or, maybe, it had been instantaneous, when he’d locked eyes with her over the top of the counter they were hiding behind and been flooded with such overwhelming relief it made him dizzy.

But the thing is, he also can’t stop thinking about Jonathan. Not in a jealous way, not like how he’d thought of him last fall, just…Jonathan, with tears in his eyes as he cut the thing out of El’s leg; Jonathan, and the gentle voice he’d used to prepare her before doing it; Jonathan, and the way he’d tried so hard to be strong at the funeral. He can’t stop thinking about that strange, sudden urge to pull Jonathan into his arms. It’s a desire that hasn’t really gone away.

He doesn’t say any of this out loud to Robin. Just says quietly, “I don’t know.”

—

“Oh.”

Steve doesn’t know why he’s surprised, really. It makes perfect sense for Nancy and Jonathan to be standing on his front porch, given that both of their little brothers are currently in Steve’s living room and it’s four minutes past the agreed-upon pickup time. He doesn’t know why he would have expected Mike and Will’s shared ride home to be with anyone _but_ Nancy and Jonathan, given that Mrs. Byers is literally always working and Mr. Wheeler probably hasn’t left his armchair for anything not strictly necessary since 1972.

But still.

It’s a lot like it was when Nancy came by a few weeks ago—the sudden breathlessness, the inexplicable concern over his appearance. Except it’s worse this time, because now Jonathan is here, and he isn’t feeling prepared to face either of them alone, let alone both of them together. The last time he saw them together was Hopper’s funeral, when he’d been all but overwhelmed with the baffling desire to hug them both, both Nancy and her new boyfriend who Steve had once beat up. Right now, he doesn’t want to hug either of them. Right now, he just wants to run.

“We’re here to pick up our brothers,” says Jonathan unnecessarily.

Nancy shoots him a look that Steve can’t decipher—almost exasperated, he thinks. Exasperated and something else unreadable. She turns back to Steve. “And to see you,” she says.

For a long moment Steve just stares at her, trying to figure out if she’s serious. It doesn’t _sound_ like a joke; there’s no smile, no trace of laughter in her voice. But it’s a baffling thing for her to say, if she means it.

“Uh,” he says, and then feels himself blush a bit, because Nancy and Jonathan are standing in his doorway and all he’s said so far is _uh_ and _oh._

Nancy’s smile falters. She and Jonathan exchange another look, and if Steve didn’t know better, he would almost think they seem nervous. He tries to imagine what they could possible be nervous about.

Then it hits him. Of _course_ they’re nervous around him. Because he’s being incredibly transparent about his feelings for Nancy, isn’t he? Shooting her all sorts of fond looks, freezing up when he sees her unexpectedly, fucking _blushing_ —fuck, Jonathan probably thinks he’s trying to steal her away. Was that why Jonathan had seemed so uncomfortable when Steve was at his house to see El? Was that why Jonathan was here with her now—to make sure Steve didn’t try to make a move on her?

The thought makes him feel sick with guilt. _I don’t want to take her from you!_ he wants to scream at Jonathan. And it’s the truth—because as much as he loves Nancy, he can’t imagine doing anything to hurt Jonathan.

They’ve all just been standing there in silence for entirely too long, Steve realizes, and to end this awful, awkward moment before it drags on for all of eternity, he turns and shouts into the house. “Hey, shitheads! Your siblings are here!”

That earns him a choked-sounding laugh from Jonathan, and when Steve turns back towards the door, he finds both of them smiling slightly. The sight fills his lungs with warmth, and he feels some of the tension drain away.

“Shitheads?” echoes Nancy, amused.

“Well,” he amends, “not Will so much. Will is, like, the perfect child.”

That makes Jonathan’s smile grow wider. “He can be absolute monster when he wants to be, I promise.”

“Hm, no, can’t picture it.” Then he nods at Nancy and adds, “ _Mike,_ on the other hand—”

“Enormous shithead,” she says, just as Mike and Will appear behind him with their backpacks slung over their shoulders.

He scowls at her. “You’re a bigger shithead.”

“Careful,” she says, holding up her car keys with a smirk, “I’m your ride home.”

Mike huffs and pushes past her, heading out to the car. Will follows, but once he’s behind Nancy and Jonathan, he stops turns back to look at Steve. He looks at him long and hard for a moment, and then from Steve to his brother and Nancy, and Steve feels absurdly exposed in this kid’s gaze. “Bye, Little Byers,” he says pointedly, lifting his hand in a wave.

But then Will and Mike are both in Nancy’s car, and Nancy and Jonathan are still just standing there. Looking at him, much more seriously than before. Steve feels his heart begin to beat a little harder.

“Listen—” starts Nancy.

But Steve cuts her off. He doesn’t want to hear it—he _can’t_ hear it, can’t hear her say that she knows he loves her and that she’s sorry, she really is, but she’s with Jonathan now and she loves him and she isn’t going to leave him. And he doesn’t want to see the look on Jonathan’s face as she says it, all menacing on the surface but still a little soft, a little uncertain, because Jonathan has never really been good at intimidation. He thinks that, confronted with that face, there’s a reasonable chance he would just burst into tears right here on his front porch.

So instead of letting her speak, he says, “You two are really great together,” and he mostly just says it to assure them that he’s not trying to break them up, but he means it, too. They _are_ great together. They’re so great together that every time sees them he forgets how to fucking breathe.

He’d thought the words would soothe away the lines of anxiety on their faces. Instead, though, Nancy’s face falls. Jonathan drops his gaze to his feet, and Steve can see him biting his lip. Steve doesn’t understand their reaction at all. He shifts his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other, feeling horribly like this whole conversation has just been a long series of missteps on his part.

“Well,” says Nancy eventually, “thanks for having them over.”

Steve lets out a long, low breath. “Yeah, sure. Any time.”

“Well.”

“Well. See you, I guess.”

“Yeah.” Nancy glances at Steve, then Jonathan, then Steve again. “Yeah, see you.”

When they’ve gone, Steve shuts the door and leans his forehead against it, closing his eyes, willing his heart to calm itself.

—

“Alright, dingus,” calls Robin, slamming Steve’s front door behind her. He hears a loud thud, and when he emerges from the kitchen, drying his hands, he finds that she’s thrown her backpack carelessly down on the floor. “You’re coming with me.”

“You just walked into my house without knocking,” he tells her.

Robin rolls her eyes as if this is an entirely irrelevant detail. “Yes, I did. Now, come on.”

“Jesus—you can’t just—” But the look Robin is giving him is eerily similar to the one Dustin always has when Steve tells him he can’t drive him to the arcade—the _it’s cute that you think I’ll ever respect your boundaries or acknowledge that you might have a life outside of hanging out with me_ look. It’s annoying as hell, and probably his least favorite expression, but they’re also not wrong; he’s terrible at enforcing boundaries, and he definitely doesn’t have a life. And really, if he’s being honest, he doesn’t actually find it _that_ annoying. So he just sighs. “What do you want?”

“I know for a fact you’ve just been sitting in here moping all day while the rest of us are at school. So I’m taking you out for ice cream. For old time’s sake.” She pauses. “Well, technically, you’re taking _me_ out for ice cream, since I don’t own a car.”

It’s Steve’s turn to roll his eyes, but he also can’t help the smile that creeps onto his face. He _has_ been moping all day, unable to stop thinking about Nancy and Jonathan hanging out in the cafeteria together on the first day of their senior year and also how pathetic it is that all of his friends are still in school while he, having graduated, is now unemployed and sulking around his parents’ house. That Robin had thought of him makes him feel a little bit better. “Alright, loser,” he says, tossing the towel over his shoulder and hearing it land on the kitchen counter with a soggy plop. “Let me get my shoes.”

He drives—at her insistence—to a dingy diner that he’s never been to and which she swears has the best milkshakes in the county. They order at the counter, and for those blissful couple minutes, Steve is glad that Robin dragged him out. It feels nice, normal, to be out ordering junk food with his best friend. Then as he’s handing over the money, she says, quietly, “Oh, shit.”

He turns to look over his shoulder. There, sitting in a booth by the window, are Nancy and Jonathan.

“I’m sorry,” says Robin, sounding genuinely guilty. “I didn’t know she’d be here, I swear.”

 _It’s fine,_ Steve wants to say, but the words get stuck in his throat as he stares at them.

Jonathan must have said something funny, because Nancy is laughing; though she’s too far away to hear, Steve can read it in her face, can imagine the sound of it perfectly in his mind. Jonathan is smiling at her, a little bit sheepishly, and as Steve watches he reaches out to take Nancy’s hand across the table. They weave their fingers together, holding on tightly, and the look on Nancy’s face melts into something softer.

Steve thinks he might be sick.

It still isn’t jealousy, exactly; it feels decidedly different than it had during those first few months after Nancy left him. But it isn’t the warmth he feels when he’s with both of them. Instead, watching the two of them together without him, he just feels frozen and empty except for the sudden aching in his stomach. He can’t think of another time he’s felt like this, except maybe when confronted with supernatural monsters.

Then suddenly, Nancy glances up at the counter, catches his eye, and freezes.

Steve quickly turns away.

“Sorry,” he says to the cashier, who he realizes is still holding his change. He reaches out to take it. “Can we, uh, can we get that to go, actually?”

“Don’t turn around,” Robin mutters. “They’re both still looking at you.”

“Are _you_ looking at _them?_ ” hisses Steve. “Jesus, could you make this any more obvious?”

“ _You’re_ the one who made eye contact with Nancy and immediately looked like he was gonna puke,” retorts Robin. “I think that alone is pretty telling.”

“Keep your fucking voice down!”

“I’m fucking _whispering,_ dingus, they’re not gonna—”

“One chocolate, one strawberry,” says the cashier, sounding bored. “Have a nice day.”

“Thanks,” says Robin, and then grabs Steve’s hand and all but drags him out of the diner.

On their way out, Steve chances one more glance over at Nancy and Jonathan. They’re both still watching him, frowning now. He notices that their grip on each other’s hands seems to have tightened. They almost seem like they’re trying to comfort each other, and he tries not to let him think to hard about what in the world that means.

—

It hasn’t been that long since Steve was at the cabin, really, but as he gets out of his car and approaches it, he feels as if an entire lifetime has passed since he was last here. He’d been dropping off Dustin and Lucas—it was sometime in May, he thinks, or maybe early June—and when they’d gotten there, Hopper had been standing out on the porch smoking a cigarette. Steve doesn’t remember whether he and Hopper had spoken at all. It was an irrelevant detail, one that he’d had no reason at the time to hold onto. Now, as he climbs the steps onto that same porch, he wishes he’d been paying more attention then. Other than whatever words they might have exchanged in the chaos of the mall, it was probably the last time he and Hopper spoke.

He hasn’t seen Jonathan or Nancy since the humiliating encounter in the diner, which, in the intervening couple of weeks, he’s replayed in his mind so many times that he’s no longer a hundred percent sure which parts actually happened and which parts his brain has exaggerated. The part where he met Nancy’s eye and immediately lost his mind—he’s pretty sure that’s real. The part where Jonathan was glaring by the time Robin had successfully dragged him away, maybe not.

Either way, Steve’s somewhere between elated and terrified at the prospect of seeing him again.

Jonathan is here already—Steve had parked right behind him, and followed the trail that his footsteps had made in the damp ground. As he reaches the cabin door, he’s overcome with an overwhelming urge to just run away. Awkwardly, he knocks on the door.

It swings open to reveal Jonathan, and for a long, tense moment, they just look at each other. Then Jonathan clears his throat. “I wasn’t sure you’d still want to come,” he says.

“Of course I came,” says Steve, “why wouldn’t I?”

Jonathan looks like he’s searching Steve’s face for something, almost like he’s trying to catch him in a lie. It’s a little unnerving, and Steve feels his face heat up slightly under the intense scrutiny. “No reason,” he says eventually.

 _So why weren’t you sure?_ Steve wants to ask. He tells himself that the reason he stays silent isn’t because he’s afraid of the answer.

Jonathan turns abruptly and goes back into the cabin, and Steve, after a moment, follows him in.

The place is a mess, even worse than he could have imagined—he’d kind of thought that Jonathan and the kids were exaggerating when they described the destruction, but he thinks, if anything, they might have understated it. There are enormous gashes in the ceiling and in the walls, and the furniture is all over the place—it’s clear that they’d tried to use it to board up the doors and windows. Splintered wood litters the floor. They’re lucky that there hasn’t been any heavy rain since that night. If they’d gotten any more than the occasional light sprinkle, everything in the house would be totally ruined.

“Here.” Jonathan pushes a broom into Steve’s hands. “Help me sweep all this up, will you?”

The lighting in the cabin is strange—dim lamplight shot through with streaks of sun pouring in from the ceiling. As he carefully sweeps the debris into piles, Steve finds himself alternately squinting against the bright sunlight and straining his eyes to see into the darker corners. Then Jonathan, absorbed in his own sweeping, passes suddenly into one of the sunbeams, Steve feels his own body go still.

Jonathan’s hair looks almost blonde in this light, a clean honey-gold that practically glows. The light glints off his face in a way that makes him look younger, somehow, or at least happier—it washes out the creases of anxiety that always decorate the corners of his eyes. It throws the muscles in his arms and back into sharp relief. All of his thoughts seem wiped clean suddenly, except for one: _This,_ he thinks to himself, _must be how Nancy sees him._

Steve doesn’t know whether Jonathan can sense that he’s being watched, or if he just happens to look up at that moment. Either way, when he meets Steve’s eyes, Steve feels a swooping in his stomach. Jonathan goes still. It’s just like that moment earlier on the porch, with both of them staring at each other, not speaking, except there’s none of the awkwardness, none of the tension. Just—Jonathan’s eyes on his, and for the half-second that it lasts, it feels like nothing else in the world has ever mattered.

Then Jonathan gives the tiniest shake of his head—so subtle that Steve doubts it was even intentional—and turns away, resuming his sweeping.

They work throughout the afternoon mostly in silence, breaking it only to give each other quiet directions, _here, hold this,_ or _pass me that nail, will you?_ It’s a little awkward at first, but slowly it grows more comfortable, and after a couple of course, Steve feels completely at home, in sync, in rhythm, moving around Jonathan like this. It’s almost like a dance. It’s almost like—he remembers trying to help Nancy cook dinner once, and the way they’d moved around each other in the crowded kitchen, squeezing past one another and smiling when their bodies touched. It’s almost like that, except that Steve and Jonathan haven’t bumped into each other yet. Steve almost wishes that they would. ****

Then, as Jonathan is nailing another board over one of the many gashes in the wall, Steve hears him take a deep, sharp breath. He turns quickly, alarmed, thinking that Jonathan has just smashed the hammer on his finger or something, but when he sees Jonathan’s face he realizes it wasn’t a gasp of pain. Jonathan was steeling himself for something. As he looks at Steve, his expression suddenly tense and closed-off, Steve feels his heart begin to pound. _This is it,_ he thinks. _Jonathan knows. This is the moment where Jonathan finally confronts me over being in love with Nancy._

Instead, what Jonathan says is, “We’re leaving Hawkins.”

For a long moment, Steve’s mind is absolutely, horribly blank. Leaving Hawkins? That doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s not something that people _do,_ especially not people like the Byers, especially not—

“My mom can’t—it’s just too much, being here. And…” He takes a deep breath, his eyes still not leaving Steve’s face. “I don’t blame her.” Then, when Steve still says nothing: “Say something?”

Jonathan sounds a little desperate, almost like he’s pleading. He looks so unhappy suddenly, and fuck, Steve would say anything if he thought it could make that unhappiness go away. “I, uh. Yeah. Yeah, that…makes sense.” The words come out sluggishly, and Steve feels oddly as if he’s not the one saying them.

“Yeah,” says Jonathan on a long exhale.

Steve can’t quite decide whether he’s feeling a lot of things or nothing at all. The former, probably, though his brain and his whole body seem to have gone numb. Finally pulls himself together enough to ask, “When?”

Jonathan hesitates as if trying to do the math in his head, even though Steve is certain that he already knows the exact date. “Uh, beginning of October, I think.”

Beginning of October. That’s barely a month away.

There are lot of thoughts rushing through his head, suddenly. Will and El will be separated from the Party. El will be separated from Mike. And Jonathan will be separated from Nancy. For an awful, guilty second, it occurs to him that this could be the end of their relationship. Long distance is hard, no matter how in love they are. And if Jonathan and Nancy break up, and if Steve is the one who’s still around in Hawkins to be there for her afterwards—

But he doesn’t want them to break up, he realizes. He knows with absolute certainty that he’s in love with Nancy, but he also knows that he doesn’t want Jonathan to leave her, and he doesn’t think it’s just out of guilt or goodwill or empathy or whatever. He’s not a good enough person for that. But the thought of Nancy _without_ Jonathan, even with all the possibilities it opens up, is also a strange one. A sad one.

Jonathan is still staring at him, he realizes, waiting for a response. With hands that feel inexplicably weak and shaky, Steve picks his hammer back up as casually as he can manage. “Well,” he says. “We’ll miss having you around, man.”

He goes back to work, careful not to look at Jonathan again, but he can tell that Jonathan’s gaze is lingering on his back long after he’s resumed hammering.

—

“Oh, shit,” says Robin when he tells her that the Byers are leaving town. “Seriously?”

Steve picks at his food, trying for nonchalance, and, he’s pretty sure, failing miserably. “Yeah. Jonathan told me when we were fixing up Hopper’s old cabin. Early October, I think.”

“That’s so quick.”

He shrugs. “It’ll be weird, not having Will and El around.”

“Yeah. They’re the only ones that aren’t completely unbearable after, like, five minutes.”

Steve manages to smile a little at the jab, which he knows she means affectionately, but there’s no humor in it. He stabs at his pasta maybe a little more aggressively than is strictly necessary.

It’s Jonathan’s leaving that bothers him the most, Jonathan who he knows he’ll most miss. He knows this makes no sense; he doesn’t hang out with Jonathan even as fraction as often as he sees the kids. He tells himself that the illogic of it is the only reason why he can’t bring himself to tell Robin how upset he is by it.

But Robin is smart, and the best friend he’s ever had, and he knows she can tell that Will and El’s leaving alone isn’t enough to explain how down he’s feeling. She frowns at him. “Are you okay? I mean, I know you love those kids, but—I don’t know, you seem extra off.”

He is extra off. He’s not sure what he’d been imagining, exactly—that he and Jonathan would become friends, real friends who hang out all the time? That he’d start tagging along with him and Nancy on their dates? But whatever it was he’d wanted, it’ll never happen now that Jonathan is leaving Hawkins. The time has passed. He’s missed his chance.

“ _Steve._ ” He startles, having forgotten somehow that she’s actually waiting for an answer. “Dude, seriously, what’s going on with you?”

“I—” It’s right there on the tip of his tongue, how much he’ll miss Jonathan. But the words finally form, it’s the other truth that spills out. “I’m in love with Nancy.”

Robin sighs, her expression softening from worry into sympathy. “I know,” she says quietly.

He can tell by the way she says it that she’s known the whole time. He supposes his evasive answer the last time she asked about it, that day in his bedroom, can’t have been terribly convincing. And he’s been nothing if not obvious about it, what with his ridiculous reaction to seeing her in the diner. Still, it’s the first time he’s admitted it out loud to anyone, and even if he’s not actually telling her anything new, it does take a little bit of the weight off his chest. There’s still the Jonathan-shaped pit in his stomach, but it’s something.

“Well,” says Robin more brightly, in an obvious effort to cheer him up. “That makes this good news, then, right?”

“What do you mean?”

She rolls her eyes at him. “If Jonathan’s leaving, you don’t have to worry about running into them together anymore. You literally never have to see his stupid face again if you don’t want to.”

He doesn’t say anything. He can’t.

She keeps going, cracking jokes at Jonathan’s expense, clearly trying to make him feel better. He appreciates the effort, because how could she possibly know how he feels about him? But it doesn’t help at all. It just makes the Jonathan-shaped pit hurt even worse. ****

—

They’re on their way to the video store to beg for jobs when Steve abruptly breaks the silence. “I should be there,” he says.

Robin turns her head to look at him. Steve doesn’t take his eyes off the road but he knows exactly what face Robin is making—her confused face, with her eyebrows raised and her lips slightly pursed. “Be where?” she asks.

“At the Byers’. To see them off. Since, you know, they’re leaving today and it’ll be awhile before we see any of them again, and—”

“Wait,” Robin interrupts him, the ghost of an incredulous laugh in her voice. “You want to go see off _Jonathan Byers?_ The same Jonathan Byers that’s dating the great and star-crossed love of your life? The one who kicked your—”

“ _Jesus_ , can we forget about the fight?” snaps Steve. “I just thought it might be nice, you know? To see him one last time.”

He risks a glance at Robin and winces at the look on her face. Her eyebrows are raised so high now that they’ve all but disappeared into her hairline. “To see him one last time,” she repeats dubiously.

Which, okay, that had been a dumb thing for him to say. “I mean, to see all of them one last time,” he corrects himself hastily. “Will and El, I mean.”

“You already said bye to Will and El,” Robin points out, correctly.

Steve can’t think of anything to say to that. He feels himself starting to get a little annoyed—not with Robin, necessarily, but just annoyed in general. Maybe with himself, a bit. Because she’s right; why the fuck would he care about saying goodbye to Jonathan? They aren’t friends. They might have fought a few monsters together, and he might be having a harder and harder time keeping Jonathan out of his mind these days, and okay, maybe he can’t stop thinking about that day at the cabin, but they aren’t _friends,_ and Jonathan’s dating his ex-girlfriend, who Steve is still in love with, so Steve should hate him, actually. He should be thrilled that the Byers are leaving Hawkins. He shouldn’t want to say goodbye.

“Yeah, well,” he mutters. It’s a lame response, and he’s waited too long before saying it, but he hopes Robin won’t call him on it.

She doesn’t. She’s still looking at him a little weirdly, but Steve can see on her face the moment she decides to humor him by letting it go. “You got your resumé with you?"

“We’re going to apply for a fucking job, aren’t we?” he says. “Of course I have it.” But he’s smiling a little as he says it. Robin is changing the subject for him, and in that moment he is so grateful for her that he could cry.

—

Time passes normally after that, which is perhaps the strangest part. It’s jarring to realize how little Jonathan had factored into his day-to-day life, how infrequently Steve had actually seen him. Mostly, his life is the same as before—he goes to work, hangs out with Robin, spends entirely too much time ferrying the kids around and lounges about his parents’ empty house. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s two kids short, and that the remaining ones are acting a little subdued, he would hardly even notice the Byers’ absence.

And yet.

He hasn’t seen Nancy in weeks. She’s busy, he knows, what with it being the fall of her senior year, but he also can’t help but wonder if maybe she’s avoiding him. If maybe she’s afraid to see him without Jonathan there as a buffer. It hurts a little to think of Nancy not wanting to be around him, and he can’t pretend he doesn’t miss her.

One day in early November, though, he emerges from the back room of the Family Video to find her standing at the counter.

Steve thinks he really has to stop doing this—seeing Nancy or Jonathan unexpectedly and then just _staring_ at them while he tries to pull his thoughts together into something coherent. But how can he not stare? Nancy’s got her hair pulled loosely and a few curls have escaped around her ears, and she’s wearing a soft sweater that—he swallows hard—he can very specifically remember pulling over her head countless times. He always used to get the collar snagged on her ponytail, yanking her hair out of place, which she’d pretend to be mad about and he’d just laugh because they both knew that her hair was going to be a mess by the time they finished anyway.

Finally, to stop his racing thoughts before they can veer into anything too explicit, he gestures at the stack of movies that she’s placed on the counter. “Didn’t think you liked sci-fi,” he says.

“I don’t,” says Nancy. “These are for Mike. I said I’d pick them up. They’re having a movie night or something.”

Steve knows that Nancy loves her brother. He also knows that there are few things she finds more annoying than having to run errands for him. He can’t really picture a scenario in which she would offer to get his movies for him. _Maybe she’s here to see you,_ supplies a very unhelpful part of his brain, and he tries to banish the thought. Wishful thinking has never gotten him anywhere with Nancy Wheeler. So all he says is, “That’s cool of you.”

Nancy shrugs. “I was nearby anyway.”

“Cool,” says Steve again, and tries not to visibly cringe at himself.

He completes her checkout in silence, afraid that he won’t be able to speak without saying something else incredibly stupid. It’s only when he pushes the movies back across the counter at her that she says, a little stiffly but still sincere-sounding, “How have you been?”

He gestures vaguely at his surroundings: _I’m here, aren’t I?_ “Living the dream.”

A shadow of a smirk appears on her face. “That bad, huh?”

“I work for _Keith Lawson,_ Nance. This must be what rock-bottom feels like.”

She laughs, and at the sound he’s overcome with emotion—love, sure, definitely, but more overwhelming is just simple affection. He _likes_ Nancy as much as he loves her, likes her company, likes joking around with her like this. He misses spending time with her just as much as he misses kissing her. For a second, he considers suggesting that they hang out sometime—how bad could it be, really? He can live with the heartache as long as he still gets to see her. Being her friend would be better than nothing.

But then he thinks of the way Jonathan’s absence would just loom over both of them, and thinks better of it. It would feel wrong to spend time with her without him there too, like something would be missing and it would just hurt more if they tried to pretend that everything was okay.

“How’s Jonathan doing?” he asks abruptly, before he can lose his nerve.

“He’s okay,” she says. “Just, you know. Adjusting.”

“Do you know when he’ll visit?”

The look she gives him then is a little strange—a little bit questioning, and maybe, he thinks, a little bit hopeful. “He’s not sure yet,” she says slowly. Then, just as she looks like she’s about to add something else, the door crashes open and a crowd of teenagers burst into the video store.

“Oh—” says Nancy. “You’re busy. I should go.”

“No, it’s okay, I—”

“Wouldn’t want you getting in trouble with Keith,” she says, flashing him one last smile before she takes her movies and leaves.

He watches out the window as she gets into her car, and continues to stare absently at the same spot long after she’s driven away. He wonders if whatever she was going to add had been important. She doesn’t usually hesitate unless it is. ****

—

Steve remembers vividly what it feels like to punch Jonathan Byers.

He’s thought about it a lot over the past few years—at first with a grim sort of pride and then, later, after he’d done a little bit of reflecting and a lot of growing up, something akin to shame. He remembers exactly how Jonathan’s skin had felt under his hands: the roughness of his face, the softness of his flesh. Jonathan’s warm, heavy, solid weight on top of him. And his eyes, all his attention, focused on Steve, Steve, Steve.

He’s thought a lot about what it felt like to hold Jonathan Byers in his hands.

He’s never thought about it like this.

He wakes up gasping, the same way he would from a nightmare, but this wasn’t a nightmare. He doesn’t know what this was, this vivid dream, half-memory, half-fantasy, though the line between the two is blurry at best. His breath is hitching—he’s crying, he realizes, awful, panicked sobs. Because this can’t be happening, it can’t be, it can’t be. He chants it to himself, muttering it over and over and over again, _can’t be, can’t be._ But, if he’s being honest with himself, he knows exactly what this was.

The dream is fading already, dissolving into only the vaguest remembered fragments of a version of Jonathan that had suddenly stopped punching and instead leaned his head down, closing the gap to press his lips firmly to Steve’s. It had been chaste, almost, as chaste as it could be with Jonathan entirely on top of him. But still, when Steve realizes that he’s doing his best to hold the dream in his mind, to keep Jonathan fixed there in his memory forever, that’s when he knows for certain.

He doesn’t miss Jonathan the way he’d miss a friend, or the way he mourns Will’s and El’s and Mrs. Byers’ departures. Missing Jonathan feels so different that _missing_ hardly seems like the right word—he misses him in a way that phone calls could never make up for. Misses him in a way that _seeing_ Jonathan could never make up for, because, he realizes, he misses Jonathan even when he’s standing right next to him. He misses every piece of Jonathan, with every piece of himself, all of the time.

He misses Jonathan the same way he misses Nancy.

He can’t be in love with Jonathan Byers.

He can’t be.

But he is.

He takes one deep, shuddering breath, then another, and another.

He’s in love with Jonathan Byers.

Now that he’s thought of it, it seems like the easiest, most obvious thing in the world.

—

In that moment, in the middle of the night, the realization had been a relief. It had explained so much, and it had felt so calming to finally have a word for the way he felt about Jonathan. Now, in the daylight, it’s anything but.

He doesn’t know what this makes him—a queer, he’d say, except he’s still in love with Nancy and isn’t sure if queers can love girls too. He also has to keep reminding himself not to use that word. It’s _derogatory,_ Robin says. Does it count as derogatory if he’s using it to describe himself? He can’t think of another word to use. He’s pretty sure the fact of Nancy rules out his being a homosexual. And besides, if he was actually a homosexual, wouldn’t he have realized it sooner? Wouldn’t there have been other boys too?

He should be going to Robin for help. Logically, he knows this. She’s the only person in the world who he knows wouldn’t judge him for this—at least, for the loving Jonathan part. Even Robin might have her reservations about wanting two people at once. And what the fuck does _that_ part make him? A Mormon?

He can’t tell Robin, though. He isn’t sure why, but every time he sees her in the days after his realization, the words sticks in his throat. He knows she can tell that he’s keeping something from her; he’s never been good at subtlety and Robin is the most observant person he’s ever met, except for maybe Nancy. But after the first couple attempts at getting it out of him, she doesn’t press it. She just accepts his inexplicable moodiness and he doesn’t care what she thinks it is—depression or pining after Nancy or what. He’s just relieved not to have to defend himself against her, too, when he already feels somehow like the entire rest of the world has turned against him.

It’s the fourth day before Robin’s careful concern turns into annoyance. It happens abruptly. She’s lounging against Steve’s shoulder when she suddenly sits up and aims the remote at the TV to pause the movie they’re watching. “You can’t keep being all miserable about Nancy,” she says decisively, as if just by saying it she can turn off his feelings for her. “I mean, it sucks, and I’m sorry, but at some point you’re going to have to move on.”

Steve just gapes at her for a moment, unsure where this is coming from, or why she’s choosing now of all times to throw this in his face. “I’m not being all miserable about Nancy,” he says.

She rolls her eyes at him. “You’re a shit liar, Harrington, you know that?”

“I’m not lying,” he snaps at her. “Just put the fucking movie back on.”

Instead of doing that, she tosses the remote across the room. It bounces uselessly on the carpet before coming to a stop. “No. Look, I love you, and I want to be here for you, but I’d be being a shitty friend if I just let you wallow like this forever. I’m serious, Steve. You’ve been even worse than usual the last few days. You’ve got to move on.”

Steve wonders if she realizes that it’s the first time she’s ever said she loves him. He knows she does, of course, and he knows she knows that he loves her too, but hearing her _say_ it out loud does something funny to his heart so that instead of lashing out at her in annoyance the way he probably would have done, he feels himself sag. He feels the words in his throat finally begin to unstick. “I…”

Robin softens a little. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be an asshole. I just…you can’t let her keep breaking your heart like this, Steve.”

He shakes his head. His heart is suddenly hammering in his chest so loudly that he’s amazed Robin doesn’t seem to hear it. And even as ninety-eight percent of his brain is screaming at him to stop, to backpedal, he hears himself say, “It’s not just Nancy.”

Robin hesitates. “Not… _just_ Nancy?”

His hands are shaking, he realizes, and he crosses his arms defensively to hide it. His mouth is dry. All of his limbs are tingling. He feels a shiver run down his entire body.

He takes a deep breath. “Remember what you told me?” he asks quietly. “In the bathroom at Starcourt?”

“No, I _forgot_.” Then she pauses a moment, seeming to process what he’s saying, and a crease appears between her eyebrows. “Steve,” she says slowly, quietly, wonderingly—a whisper of breath, the same way she’d said his name all those months ago when it was _her_ telling _him_ her biggest secret, not the other way around.

“Robin,” he replies. He feels—not dizzy, exactly, but strangely unreal. His breaths are beginning to catch a little. _You will not fucking cry right now, Harrington,_ he tells himself, but he knows even as he thinks it that it’s a lost cause. He can already feel the pressure building behind his eyes.

“Who is it?” she asks.

He squeezes his eyes shut. Of course she’ll be okay with it. Of course she’ll support him. All the same, he can’t bear to see her face when he says it. “I think you already know, Robs.”

There’s a long pause. Then—“Jonathan,” she realizes softly.

He can’t bring himself to speak to confirm it. He just nods.

“You—both of them?”

He nods again.

She’s silent again for a long time after that—hours, it feels like, even though it can’t be more than a few seconds. _You OD over there?_ he wants to ask, but he’s not convinced he’ll be able to form words without bursting into tears. So he waits.

Finally she says, “Well, that explains a lot.”

He opens his eyes to look at her, finally, and is surprised to find her smiling. “It…does it?”

“Dude, it explains _so much._ I’m so fucking stupid. You wanted to go say goodbye to him, remember? You two aren’t friends. Why would you want to do that unless you’re in love with Nancy _and_ him? And—” She laughs. “That day in the diner, remember? Jesus, you were _way_ more dramatic than would make sense if you were just jealous of him. I’ve never seen anyone blush as hard as you did when you saw the two of them together.”

In spite of himself, he feels a sheepish smile begin to spread on his own face. “I don’t blush,” he insists.

“You _so_ blush!” she shouts. She’s grinning now, triumphant. “Steve the Hair Harrington, you _blush_ when you run into Jonathan fucking Byers!” ****

“Keep your fucking voice down!” he laughs, as if there’s anyone else in the house to hear them.

He feels like something in his chest is unfolding, blooming—a shimmer of warmth expanding outward through his body. He feels _new_ , and _alive,_ and he can almost forget about the fact that Jonathan is gone and he and Nancy will never love him anyway because Robin is here, and she’s laughing with him, and he has an explanation for everything now, and he’s _told_ her, and somehow, impossibly, _wonderfully,_ the world is still turning.

“I love you,” he says.

Her smile softens. “I love you, too,” she tells him, even though she was the one who said it first.

Steve leans over to pull her into his arms. She hugs him back tightly, resting her head against his shoulder.

He has Robin. Whatever he is, whatever happens with Nancy and Jonathan, he’s going to be okay. ****

—

For a long moment, he isn’t sure what woke him. He’s as comfortable as he’s ever been, lying in his bed with Robin, who’d ended up staying over the night before. He tries to imagine himself from just a few months ago, friendless except for a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. And now here he is, holding his sleeping best friend while early-morning sunlight streams in through the window.

Then the doorbell rings again, and he realizes: that must be what woke him.

He pulls slowly away from Robin, careful not to wake her. She makes a soft, sleepy noise, burrowing her face deeper into his pillow, and he thinks he might burst with fondness. Then he slips quietly from the room, heading downstairs to tell whichever kid is at his door to fuck off until at least ten o’clock.

When he opens the door, though, it’s not any of his children.

It’s Nancy.

She’s bathed in in gentle, dappled autumn sunlight, bouncing slightly from foot to foot to keep warm in the morning chill. And he can’t help it. He just _gazes_ at her.

She’s so beautiful.

She’s so fucking beautiful that it’s like a stake is being driven directly through his heart, but if it hurts, it’s a pain he relishes. He’d let Nancy stab him through the heart over and over and over again, he thinks.

Nancy and Jonathan both. God—they could do _anything_ to him. Because he _loves_ them, both of them, and as desperately painful as it is, he never wants the feeling to go away.

“ _Steve,_ ” she says, exasperated, and he jolts back to real life. He realizes she must have said his name a few times. “You with me?”

“Yeah.” His voice comes out humiliatingly breathy. He clears his throat. “Yeah, sorry. Sorry. What, uh, what can I do for you?”

She seems to hesitate a moment, and Steve can see a very significant _something_ flickering in her eyes, but he can’t identify what it is. It’s gone as quickly as it came, leaving her looking perfectly calm and ordinary. As he watches her, she straightens up slightly, the way she always does when she thinks she’s about to have to plead her case. The stake in his heart plunges just a little bit deeper.

“I need a favor,” she says.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _These fragile bodies of touch and taste  
>  This fragrant skin, this hair like lace  
> Spirits open to the thrust of grace  
> Never a breath you can afford to waste_

“A favor.” He repeats the words slowly. Nancy is about the most self-sufficient person he’s ever met; what could she possibly need _him_ for, of all people? He’s already her little brother’s unpaid babysitter; he’s already saved her life during the apocalypse more than once. That pretty much covers the range of his abilities, he thinks.

“Yeah,” she says. “Look, Thanksgiving is coming up.”

She pauses then, and Steve is unsure if she’s just hesitating or if she’s expecting some kind of response from him. After a few seconds, he says a little uncertainly, “Yes?”

“Yeah. And the Byers invited Mike and I.”

He still has no idea where this is going. Of course Nancy and Mike are going to see their boyfriend and girlfriend for Thanksgiving; he’d fully expected that, whether it meant the Wheelers going to visit them or the Byers coming back to Hawkins for a few days. All the same, it seems a little cruel of Nancy to bring it up like this, to throw it in his face that she gets to see Jonathan and he doesn’t. He has to remind himself that she has no idea how much it hurts him to know that.

“Also,” adds Nancy, “there was never any chance we were gonna get to visit without the rest of the kids wanting to tag along, so I’ve been roped into driving all four of them.”

It occurs to Steve then that if everyone else is leaving town, then he and Robin will be the only ones around to deal with whatever monsters might pop up in Hawkins while they’re gone. He wonders if this is why she’s telling him. To prepare him, maybe? To make sure he’ll be okay if his monster-fighting crew is suddenly reduced to a team of two? Is she for some reason _expecting_ everything to be about to go to shit again?

But Nancy, though she still looks a little nervous, doesn’t look anywhere close to end-of-the-world nervous. “The thing is,” she says, “it’s about an eight-hour drive. And my parents don’t want me going that far by myself. They said I have to find someone else to split the driving with. And obviously that’s not gonna be any of the kids.”

“I dunno, Max is pretty competent,” says Steve. Then, a beat later, he realizes what it is that Nancy’s asking. “Wait—”

“Will you come?” she asks in a rush.

For about half a second, he’s elated. Thanksgiving with Nancy and Jonathan—that’s a real holiday, one of the big ones. You don’t spend that holiday with someone unless you’re related to them or in love. He pictures all three of them clustered together at one end of the table, laughing together, their hands brushing as they pass the asparagus. Then he remembers that they aren’t actually dating, and that all of the kids will be there too so it’s definitely not a romantic proposal, and the image changes—it’s Nancy and Jonathan giggling at one end of the table, while Steve is stuffed between Mrs. Byers and one of his four-year-olds, trying to look anywhere but at them.

Something must have shown on his face, because even though he hasn’t said anything yet, Nancy looks crestfallen. She shoves her hands deeper into her pockets and hunches her shoulders up a bit in a way that reminds him, vividly, startlingly, of Jonathan. “You don’t have to,” she says hurriedly. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked, it’s a super long trip and of course it would be weird for you and, God, it’s Thanksgiving, I’m sure you have plans—”

“I don’t have plans,” he interrupts, because that’s the one part of this that he can address with certainty. He can’t remember the last time his parents bothered to come home for Thanksgiving. 

Any other time, he knows, Nancy would address that, would ask him extremely not-subtle questions about whether he’s got any family in town even though she knows perfectly well that he doesn’t. Now, though, she just looks cautiously hopeful.

And fuck—Steve’s sure she doesn’t _mean_ to be wheedling him with that expression, but he’d be hard-pressed to deny her anything in the best of times and he knows there’s no way he’ll manage to say no to her when she’s looking at him like that. So, already knowing it’s a terrible decision that he’s going to regret intensely, he says, “Yeah, okay. I’ll come.”

“Really?” And she’s looking at him with such naked delight that makes him feel absolutely giddy. If being trapped in a car with her for sixteen hours so that he can go watch her and Jonathan be disgustingly in love without including him is what it takes to get her to look at him like _that_ , then maybe it’s worth it. Or maybe, Steve thinks, his priorities are just horribly, hopelessly skewed. It’s probably the latter. That’s what Robin would say, at least.

That’s confirmed when, after Nancy has left with a promise to call him later with the details, he turns around to find that Robin has woken up and is now sitting about halfway up the staircase, watching him. She looks thoroughly unimpressed.

“I’ve always known you were an idiot,” she says, “but this one _really_ takes the cake.”

He tries to act casual. “Why?”

“ _Why?_ Uh, hello? You are going to take your _ex-girlfriend_ who you are _still in love with_ on a cross-country road trip to visit her _current boyfriend_ who you are _also in love with—_ ”

“Okay, Jesus, keep your voice down,” says Steve, glancing nervously behind him as if there’s a chance he might find that he didn’t close the door after all, and that Nancy is still standing there, listening to this whole conversation. He imagines the expressions that would cycle across her face if she heard Robin’s words—confusion and then shock and then horror and then embarrassment before she finally settled, humiliatingly, on pity. There are a lot of things that Steve wants from Nancy, but her pity definitely isn’t one of them.

“I mean, how do you think this is going to work out?” She pulls herself up by the bannister and comes the rest of the way down the stairs to meet him in the hall. “You think she’s gonna, what, fall in love with you somewhere around hour five and then tell Jonathan when you get there that they’re both dating you, now, too?”

He knows, of course, that the scenario Robin is describing could never happen. He knows that _nothing_ will happen except probably his heart getting thoroughly trampled for a few days. Still, it stings a little to hear her say it like that. “You were a lot nicer about this last night.”

She sighs. “I’m trying to be supportive, Steve. I _am_ supportive. You know I’d never judge you for being in love with two people or for being bisexual or whatever you are—”

“Wait,” says Steve, “bisexual?”

“Yeah, like, you like both. You _know_ I’d never judge you for that. But I’d also be being a shitty friend if I let you be, like, completely unrealistic about this. I just…” She sighs again. “I just don’t want you to get hurt by them. Again.”

“I think it’s going to hurt either way,” says Steve, and he knows as he says it that it’s the truth. Then he adds, “I didn’t know there was a word for it.”

Robin rolls her eyes. “There’s a word for everything, dingus,” she says. But she’s smiling a little and he knows without her having to say it what she means: _just ask me next time._ It’s solid advice. He hasn’t found much that Robin doesn’t know the answer to. She pretty much always seems to be right.

He can only hope that she won’t end up being right about how bad an idea this trip is.

—

There are, he knows, a lot of problems with his Thanksgiving plans. No matter how he slices it, it’s going to hurt like hell to spend so much time around them. And he’s not exactly going to have an easy exit if it gets to be too much, since he’ll be hundreds of miles from home with Nancy’s car as the only getaway vehicle. Then there are the usual concerns of late-autumn travel, though those are less pressing—there could easily be a blizzard, or the car could break down and they’d be stranded in the cold, or he could end up driving around with four children who’ve all been hit by the worst of flu season.

But of all the problems he imagined, he would never have anticipated this one.

“What do you mean, you’ll be _home?_ ” he says to his mom over the phone. He tries to keep the incredulity out of his voice, but he’s pretty sure that he doesn’t succeed.

“Exactly that,” his mom says. “Our flight gets in on Wednesday night. We’ll be home through Saturday, at least.”

“Uh,” says Steve.

It’s not that it’s even been that long since he last saw his parents. They’ve been home a few times over the course of the fall, checking in like they always do every few weeks, mostly, Steve thinks a little bitterly, just to assuage their own guilt before they take off again. And they’re about due for another visit, so he really shouldn’t be so surprised at having them around for Thanksgiving. But he _is_ surprised, and it’s that—the realization that his parents are so absent that it hadn’t even _occurred_ to him that they might possibly be home for the holidays this year—that catches him so off-guard. 

“We were thinking we could do a real Thanksgiving this year.” That’s his dad speaking now, after an awkward shuffling as the phone was passed to him. “Turkey and everything. Or whatever you want.”

It’s not that he dislikes his parents, either, exactly. They’re both perfectly nice people, or he supposes they would be if they were around more. Sure, his dad is kind of an asshole, but—well, any other year, he’d be absolutely, pathetically over the moon at the prospect of getting to spend a holiday with them. But this year—“I, uh, I have plans.”

There’s a long silence on the other end of his phone. Then his mom says carefully, “Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of plans?”

“Um.” His parents know that it’s been over a year since he and Nancy were together. Somehow, he gets the impression that they won’t fully understand why he wants to drive halfway across the country with her, and they _definitely_ won’t understand why Jonathan Byers’ new house is the destination. “I’m going to visit some friends,” he says evasively, knowing that the half-truth will only buy him a couple of seconds before his mom demands more details.

Immediately, predictably, she does. “What friends?”

“Just a couple friends from my old team. They’re at Indiana now. I’m just gonna go up to Bloomington for a few days to see them.”

He realizes as soon as he’s said it how flimsy a lie it is. The university is only a couple hours away; anyone he knows there would almost certainly be coming back to Hawkins to visit, and his parents could easily demand he come back home for at least one evening to see them.

But they don’t. They don’t even ask the names of Steve friends—probably, he realizes suddenly, because they wouldn’t recognize them anyway. He can’t remember the last time his parents attended one of his basketball games; sophomore year? Maybe even earlier? His mom just sighs. “Well, alright,” she says. “We’ll miss you.”

 _Will you really?_ he wants to ask. For half a second, he considers pointing out that it’s usually his parents, not him, who are responsible for keeping the family separated on Thanksgiving. But all things considered, starting an argument about it over the phone would probably be more trouble than it’s worth. 

“I’ll miss you too,” he says, and it isn’t quite a lie, but he feels nothing approaching regret over his decision as he hangs up the phone.

—

It isn’t a surprise to see Robin at his window. This isn’t the first time she’s snuck out to come over to his place in the middle of the night. The tapping at the glass doesn’t startle him anymore, not like it did the first time when he’d flung the window open and practically knocked her off his roof with the nail bat before realizing who it was. It’s something of a routine, now—a couple times a month, when Robin can’t sleep, she ends up at Steve’s house and he takes her downstairs so they can watch some shitty TV show until they both doze off on the couch.

It isn’t a surprise. But he’s still shocked when he pulls open the window, because he’s never seen her like this.

He can tell even in the darkness how pale she is, can see how violently she’s shivering, perched up on his roof without even a sweater over her thin t-shirt. Her eyes are red and puffy and her breath is coming in gasps, way more than would be justified by the bike ride over, and he realizes quickly that she’s having a full-blown panic attack.

“Shit,” he mutters, and carefully helps her climb in through the window. He rubs his hands up and down her arms, trying to warm her. “Jesus, Robs, you’re freezing.”

“I-I’m sorry,” she stutters out between ragged breaths, “I—”

“Shh, hey, it’s okay. It’s okay.” He lets go of her just long enough to pull the window shut against the freezing air outside before returning his hands to her shoulders. “Just—just breathe, Robin, can you do that?”

He’s entirely out of his depth here. It’s different with the kids—they’re just so much _younger_ than he is, comforting them is basically an instinct. But with Robin—they just deflect their trauma with humor, usually. He cracks a joke or two and it’s enough to snap her out of whatever funk she’s in. If one of them is upset in any real way, it’s usually Steve. Steve’s the one who’s a mess. Robin’s the strong one. That’s how it _works._

But now Robin’s breath is coming faster and faster and she’s backing away from Steve, covering her face with her hands to muffle the choked, panicked half-sobs coming out of her, and Steve has no idea what to do.

“Breathe. Robin, listen, just—here, breathe with me, okay?” He takes a few slow, exaggerated breaths. “Yeah, you got it. That’s it. Yeah. Okay.”

It takes a few minutes of Steve just standing there, hands stretched toward her as if he’s trying to calm a wild animal, before her breathing begins to slow. When it finally does, she sags a bit, looking more defeated than ever. “ _Fuck,”_ she mutters into the hands that are still covering her face.

Steve takes that as his cue to approach her again. Hesitantly, he puts an arm around her shoulders, and when she doesn’t pull away he draws her against him in a tight embrace. She doesn’t hug him back, just lets her arms hang limply at her sides, but she leans into him, pressing her face into his shoulder.

“I’ve got you,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

He rubs her back, trying to calm his own racing heart. Nothing’s really happened, he’s sure. If it was a real Code Red situation, Robin wouldn’t have allowed herself so much time to break down. Dustin would be with her, or at least screaming at Steve over the radio. Everyone’s safe. Everyone has to be safe.

“Was it a nightmare?” he asks her after another few minutes.

She nods into his shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

He knew already that Robin gets nightmares sometimes. She’s told him about them; sometimes, other nights when she’s come over, it’s been because she woke up from one and couldn’t fall back asleep. But she’s never reacted like this.

“What was different this time?” he asks.

“I don’t know.” Her voice is still muffled against him, so that he can feel it vibrating through him as much as he can hear it. “Nothing was different, I just—I woke up and I—”

“Yeah.” He sighs into her hair. “Come on, you should lie down.”

She doesn’t resist, letting him lead her to his bed and push her gently down and pull her shoes off for her and pile blankets on top of her. She just lets her head sink into the pillow, looking exhausted and miserable. Steve lies down beside her.

She’s silent for so long that Steve hopes maybe she’s fallen asleep. But then she whispers, “They did it in front of me this time.”

He turns his head to look over at her. “What?”

“The Russians. Usually, in the dream, it’s—they bring me to you and you’re already dead, I’m yelling your name and you won’t wake up, but this time—you were still conscious when I saw you, and then—they—”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Steve says. He knows without her saying what the rest of the dream entailed. He’s had the same one himself, countless times since the Fourth of July: Robin, being tortured to death right in front of him while he’s powerless to stop it. Dustin and Erica, sometimes, too. Those dreams are always the worst ones.

“You were alive,” whispers Robin. “And then you just—you weren’t anymore.”

Steve rolls onto his side so that he can pull her close. She doesn’t protest, curling into him freely. “I’m alive,” he says quietly. “I’m still alive. I promise.”

“I know that _now,_ dingus,” Robin says into his chest, but even as she says it, she’s burrowing closer.

“Although,” Steve adds after a moment, “I might not be after tomorrow.”

He expects Robin to laugh slightly, maybe to crack some joke of her own about how he’ll never survive the full day of driving with Nancy that he’s scheduled to begin seven hours from now. Instead, though, she pulls away, propping herself up on one arm so that she’s looking down at him.

“I’m sorry,” he says immediately, realizing that he must have made a wild misjudgment. He shouldn’t have joked about dying so soon after Robin’s nightmare. “Shit, sorry, too soon—”

“No, it’s not that,” says Robin. “Just—fuck, I forgot you were leaving tomorrow. I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking, you’re gonna be exhausted now that I’ve woken you up, I’ll just—”

“Robs.” He pulls her back down. “It’s okay. I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. You think I was gonna get any sleep at all before this trip?”

Finally, at that, she allows herself a tiny smile. “You’re so in love with them it’s pathetic.”

“Maybe you were right,” he says. He’s been thinking it for days, ever since Robin first pointed out how bad an idea this trip was, but now for the first time he admits it aloud to her. “Maybe this is more than I can handle.”

“You’ll be okay,” she says. “You’ve saved the world, what, three times now, remember? You’ve got this.”

“They’ve saved the world even more,” he points out. He sighs. “I don’t know. Maybe I should just stay home.”

She swats his arm. “You’re _going,_ dingus.”

“I thought you were against this whole thing.”

“I am. But you already promised, and I’m _more_ against you ruining the kids’ Thanksgiving by refusing to take them. Also, I’m pretty sure Mike would murder you.”

“He might,” concedes Steve. “But he kind of seems like he’s about a half step from murdering me no matter what I do, so.”

“He loves you.”

“Maybe.”

“Too bad it’s not the other Wheeler.”

“Fuck, Robs. Too soon.”

She laughs lightly, and the sound is enough to ease his remaining worry for her. He pulls her closer, and eventually she falls asleep, curled up in his arms. After a long time of listening to her steady breath, he falls asleep too.

—

“DUDE!” screams Dustin. “This is going to be SO MUCH FUN.” 

Steve heaves his duffle bag into the trunk. “No,” he says.

“No?”

“The only two of you shitheads I would ever willingly go on a eight-hour drive with are the two who currently live eight hours away.”

Dustin rolls his eyes. Lucas, from the other side of the car, shouts, “You know you love us!”

Steve just slams the trunk shut and swats harmlessly at Dustin’s head, just hard enough to knock his hat off. “ _Hey!”_

“Can we _go_ already?” Mike is standing off to the side, his arms crossed. He’s scowling, but then again, he does that so much that Steve is starting to wonder if maybe his face just looks like that. 

“Hold your horses, Wheeler, Jesus,” says Steve, and the scowl deepens.

“Are you gonna be like this the whole way there?” Lucas asks Mike. “Because I _will_ push you out of the car somewhere in Missouri.”

Mike turns his glare on Lucas. “Talk to me once you know what it’s like to be separated from your girlfriend for _two whole months._ ”

“At least you all didn’t lose the only other Party member of your gender!” shouts Max, straightening from where she’s been trying to wedge her skateboard between the two front seats. “Do you know how much it _sucks ass_ having to hang around you losers all the time?”

“El is kind of a loser, too,” Dustin points out good-naturedly. Mike opens his mouth, but his heated protest is cut off by Dustin raising his hands as if in surrender. “Just saying! I mean, she hangs out with _us_ all the time.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Max says. “Me and her are way too good for you guys.”

“Hey!” shouts Lucas indignantly, and then they’re all talking at once, yelling over each other and arguing.

Steve turns away from them, trying to feel annoyed that they’re already giving him a headache before they’ve even started driving. Really, though, he’s having a hard time holding back his smile. When he glances at Nancy, he sees the same expression on her face as she watches them—not a smile, quite, but a soft, gentle fondness that makes Steve’s heart skip a beat.

As if she can sense him watching her, she turns and catches his eye. Her tiny smile broadens into a grin that makes him so breathless that, for a moment, he considers calling off this whole thing. Because how the fuck is he supposed to keep his attention on the road if Nancy is going to look at him like _that?_ “They’re unbearable,” she says.

He swallows hard. “I can’t believe I got roped into this,” he hears himself say. “I’m not even related to any of them, for fuck’s sake.”

“Don’t you dare abandon me now, Steve Harrington,” says Nancy sternly.

Then both of them turn, startled, at a particularly loud screech from Dustin. He’s chasing Max, who has his hat perched precariously on her own head, and he’s shouting such a string of obscenities that even Steve, who’s really never set a very good example in that department, considers chastising him for it. Instead he just shouts, “Hey, shitheads! Get in the car before we decide not to take you at all!”

“I’m the one who was actually _invited,_ ” grumbles Mike, but all the same, he piles into the car with the rest of the kids.

Steve turns back towards Nancy, a lighthearted taunt about her asshole of a little brother on his lips, but he finds that she’s no longer looking at him. She’s looking past him, towards the house, and her whole body as gone rigid suddenly, her smile vanished.

He turns to see what it is she’s looking at, tense himself, half-expecting to see some horrifying flesh monster emerging from the ground. Instead it’s Robin, who’s finally woken up and is now standing on Steve’s front porch, shivering a little despite having snagged one of his hoodies. “Were you just gonna leave without saying goodbye, asshole?” she calls across the yard, grinning.

He smiles a little sheepishly at her. “Sorry. I didn’t want to wake you up.” _Not after how shitty a night you had,_ he thinks, but he’s not going to say that out loud in front of the kids.

“Like I could have slept through all these children screaming in the front yard.” Then she shifts her gaze a little to the side. “Hey, Nancy.”

He glances back at Nancy again. She’s frowning, he realizes, and hasn’t relaxed at all—she’s still holding herself tensely, almost defensively. “Hey, Robin,” she says stiffly.

Steve feels a flash of annoyance. Does Nancy not _like_ Robin? He remembers suddenly that day, months ago, when Nancy had come by to check on him. She’d looked unhappy at the mention of Robin then, too. Sure, Nancy doesn’t really know her all that well, but Steve can’t think of any reason why she’d outright dislike her. Robin is the best person he’s ever met. _Everyone_ should like Robin. 

But there’s nothing he can do about that right now. So he just meets Robin halfway as she starts to approach him from the porch and catches her in a tight hug. 

“It’s only a couple days, dingus,” she says into his shoulder, sounding amused. 

He doesn’t let go.

“Dude, seriously. You’ll be fine.”

He gives her a final squeeze, tight enough that she squawks in protest, and then puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her back a little so he can look into her face. “Will _you_ be fine?” he asks quietly, seriously.

“Course I will.”

“Call me if you need anything, okay? Seriously. You have the Byers’ number, right? If anything happens—”

“I’ll be _fine,_ ” she insists with a smile. “I promise. And anyway—” she lowers her voice and a conspiratorial look comes over her face— “you’re the one who’s more likely to need _my_ help this week, dingus.”

That’s probably true, Steve thinks. And he knows she’ll be okay. Robin is stronger than he is, stronger than he’ll ever be, and her state of panic last night had been the exception more than the rule. But still, he can’t help the sudden spike of anxiety thrumming through him at the thought of leaving her alone in Hawkins without a single other person who knows about all the monster business. Well, there’s Erica, he supposes. But he’s pretty sure Robin would sooner face the end of the world alone than drag a ten-year-old into it again.

 _Come with us,_ he almost says, but before he can speak, she slaps him lightly on the arm. “See you Sunday,” she says. “Drive safe, okay?”

“We will,” he promises. “See you Sunday.”

When he turns away from her, he finds that Nancy is already in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel, staring resolutely ahead. “Bye, Robin!” shouts Dustin through the still-open door before slamming it shut.

As they drive away, Robin continues to stand in the yard, waving. Steve watches her until she’s out of sight.

—

It makes sense that Nancy is driving first. It’s her car, after all, and it’s really her trip. Still, Steve wishes he was the one behind the wheel. It would give him something to focus on, something besides the fact that she looks so obscenely beautiful in this soft, slanted, early-morning light, and that her hands on the wheel are strong and delicate all at once. God, her _hands._ Was he ever this fixated on her hands when they were actually dating? Somehow, he doesn’t think so.

What a fucking waste. He was lucky enough to have been Nancy Wheeler’s boyfriend for almost an entire year, and yet, at the time, he hadn’t appreciated it at all. Hadn’t bothered to notice those things about her, the unearthly beauty that came over her when they passed from shadow into sunlight, the slender lines of her fingers. Or—he _had_ noticed those things, had noticed them enough to have them still committed to memory a year later, but he never thought to cherish them the way he should have. The way he would now. The way he _does_ now.

“So,” says Dustin suddenly, startling Steve out of his thoughts. “Robin.”

Steve glances up to make eye contact with him in the rearview mirror. “That’s her name,” he confirms. “What about her?”

“She slept over last night?”

He lets out a long, loud groan and then turns in his seat so he can more effectively fix Dustin with the full force of his glare. “Dude, _again?_ I’ve already told you—”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s not like that,” Dustin interrupts. “Seriously, man, how dumb do you think I am?”

“Pretty fucking dumb,” says Steve, “if you can’t figure out what _I’m not dating Robin and I never will_ means.”

Dustin rolls his eyes. “But she’s, like, the coolest person ever.”

“Yes,” says Steve, “she is. And she’s my best friend. And we’re _not dating,_ so can it, Henderson.”

“I just don’t understand _why_ —”

Max interrupts him. “Are you sure _you_ don’t have a crush on Robin, Dusty-Bun?”

“Fuck off! My heart belongs to Suzie and Suzie alone.”

“Tuuuurn aroouuund,” starts Lucas. “Look at what you seeee-eeee-eeee.”

“IN HER FACE,” screams Max. “THE MIRROR OF YOUR DREEEE-EEEE-EEAAAAMS.”

Steve watches, amused and a little relieved at the abrupt end to his interrogation, as Dustin huffs and sinks down in his seat, arms crossed. He mutters something that Steve can’t hear.

Max points dramatically at Mike as if to cue him in. After a moment’s hesitation in which he pretends to look reluctant, he half-heartedly mumbles, “Make believing everywhere, give into the light.”

“Oh my god,” says Dustin, “at least get the words _right,_ for fuck’s sake.”

Steve twists back to face front again, unable to stop the grin that’s spreading on his face. He glances over at Nancy, expecting that, like that morning in his yard, she would meet his eyes and smile back—a show of amused solidarity, _can you believe how much we put up with from these losers?_

But Nancy isn’t looking at him, and she isn’t smiling, either. She’s staring straight ahead, clutching the wheel harder now than she had been before. She looks intensely focused, like she might in bad traffic, but there isn’t any traffic at all, just a single blue pickup truck winding along about a hundred yard ahead of them.

He opens his mouth to ask her what’s wrong, but for some reason, the words die in his throat. He watches her for a moment longer before turning away. He focuses on the kids’ increasingly loud chatter in the backseat, hoping to distract himself from thinking too hard about Nancy.

—

Four hours in, Nancy still has hardly said a word. When he tries to speak to her, she gives him a terse, close-mouthed smile. It’s the face she always used to make when she was angry about something but didn’t want to admit it, when she stopped herself from talking so that she wouldn’t accidentally say anything that betrayed her feelings. She’s biting something back—regret, Steve realizes, his heart sinking. She regrets bringing him along. And, fuck, of course she does. Why would she want him there? Why would she want him, her ex-boyfriend, there to see her emotional reunion with the current love of her life? And if she’s guessed his feelings— _not possible,_ he tries to tell himself, but his mind won’t listen—if she’s guessed his feelings, then of course she doesn’t want to be staying in the same house as him for the next four nights. He once snuck into her window after she explicitly told him not to. He wouldn’t blame her if she worried he’d pull the same sort of shit again.

They stop at a gas station to fill up and switch positions. He decides pretty much immediately that driving is worse. He can’t turn around to chat with the kids. The mirror is at the wrong angle to meet any of their eyes. The only person he can look at, in swift glances away from the road, is Nancy. ****

He tries not to do that too much.

—

The kids are asleep. He marks time by trying to imagine what Jonathan might be doing. Four o’clock—he’s at work, at the part-time job that Steve assumes he must have. Maybe he’s gotten another internship with the local paper. Maybe he works at a record store. Jonathan would probably enjoy that kind of pretentious shit. Five o’clock, he’s driving home. He’s helping his mom cook dinner. He’s pacing in front of the living room window, waiting for Nancy. Waiting for the kids, even, who he loves almost as much as his own brother. Probably not waiting for Steve. He’s patiently answering El and Will’s questions— _no, they aren’t here yet; yes, they’ll be here soon; no, you can’t take my record player._

“Steve,” says Nancy, jolting him out of his thoughts. 

He shifts slightly, locks his elbows to stretch his arms out, trying in vain to find a position that’s still comfortable after hours of driving. “Yeah?”

“Do you remember when we went to the state fair? Summer before last?”

Summer before last—back when Nancy still loved him, or at least pretended to; back when Steve was still allowed to love her out loud. “Yeah,” he says again. Of course he remembers. He remembers every single fucking thing about when they were together.

“You won me that stupid bear, remember?” she says. 

He glances away from the road. He tries to search her face for any hint at why she’s bringing this up now, but it’s dark; he can only really see her for a second at a time when another car’s headlights shine briefly through the window. Either Nancy doesn’t notice him watching her or she’s deliberately ignoring it. She just keeps looking straight ahead. After a few seconds, Steve turns his gaze back toward the road too.

“Mr. McCuddles,” he says. He’s surprised at how steady his voice comes out. “Protector of the Realm.” _What realm?_ he’d asked her at the time, laughing. 

_Our realm,_ she’d said, and kissed him. That was months before he’d ever been dragged into a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with the kids. Now, he wonders if “Protector of the Realm” is something she picked up from them, from years of listening to them scream through their high-fantasy roleplays. 

“As if a teddy bear could ever have protected us,” says Nancy, “after everything we’d already been through.”

“Well,” says Steve, “it was a fucking enormous teddy bear,” and Nancy laughs a little.

There’s something funny happening in his chest—his heart inflating and deflating all at once. This is a dangerous conversation. He knows that—god, he knows that. Every conversation with Nancy is dangerous, and swapping memories from when they used to date is, he thinks, the worst thing they could possibly be doing. But just like when she was standing on his doorstep driving a stake through his heart, he finds himself almost craving the pain. It’s like a bruise that he can’t stop morbidly jamming his finger into. He wonders if that makes him crazy. It seems like maybe it does, a little.

Nancy is silent after that for long enough that Steve thinks the conversation must be over. He casts around for something else to say, but his mind feels sluggish and stupid. It’s like he’s never had an interesting thought in his life. Then, before he can think of anything, Nancy speaks again. “Do you ever wonder,” she asks, more quietly now, “what would have happened if we’d stayed together?”

The question is like a sharp blow directly to his chest. He tightens his grip on the wheel. “What do you mean?” he asks carefully.

“I don’t know. I just—wonder, sometimes, is all. Do you…” She hesitates, then plows ahead. “Do you still wish things had turned out differently? I mean—with us?”

He turns his head and stares at her for a long time, even though it’s so dark he can just barely see her silhouette. There’s a twisted, unbearable sort of hope running through him—why would she ask that if she didn’t wish it too?—but then it sours into something more like anger. “That’s not fair,” he says eventually.

She glances over at him. “What?”

“That’s not fair,” he repeats. He’s facing forward again, but he can dimly see her reflection in the windshield, still watching him. “ _You_ left _me_ , Nancy. You—” He swallows hard. He’s made his peace with it—it’s funny, and a little alarming, he much he can forgive when he’s in love—but it still stings. It’s the one truth that’s hard to reconcile with how he feels about them now. “You _cheated_ on me. And it doesn’t matter now,” he adds when she opens her mouth to say something, “it’s all…water under the bridge, or whatever. But you—you can’t ask me to say I still have feelings for you after that. That’s not fair.” _Especially when I_ do _have feelings for you,_ he thinks desperately.

“I…” She’s looked away from him and seems to be casting around for words. Eventually she lands on, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then how did you mean it?” He says it more sharply than he intended to, but finds that he doesn’t regret his tone. He loves Nancy, God, he loves her so fucking much that he thinks it might kill him, but he knows he’s right about this. He knows he’s not wrong to be angry. It’s just cruel of her to ask him that, to demand to know she’s still loved after she’d so harshly refused that love to him. “I’m serious, Nancy, how the fuck did you mean it?”

“I didn’t mean anything,” says Nancy quietly. “I don’t know why I said it. I’m sorry.”

And she does sound sorry, which surprises him. He’d expected her to fight back, to get defensive, because that’s what Nancy does when she’s backed into a corner. When he glances over at her next, she’s turned to look out the window. 

Nancy doesn’t say anything without reason. She’s thoughtful and deliberate, always, even if the result isn’t necessarily kind. But if Steve is being honest with himself, he’s not sure he wants to know what she really meant. And they’ve still got four kids in the backseat who Steve definitely doesn’t want waking up and overhearing this conversation.

So he accepts the apology silently, and turns his attention back toward the road.

—

It’s nearly six when they finally pull into the Byers’ driveway. 

“Is this it?” he asks Nancy. 

“This is it,” says Mike from the backseat before Nancy can answer. Steve doesn’t question how he knows. Mike is alert now, sitting fully up—all the kids are. 

The Byers must have been waiting with their faces pressed to the window, because the front door opens immediately. For just a moment, Steve recognizes Jonathan silhouetted against the light inside. It’s a moment that seems to last forever while he stares at him, mesmerized—that’s him, that’s _Jonathan_ , a real person, right there, still so solid even so far from home. Steve realizes suddenly with a lurch of his stomach that he hasn’t actually seen Jonathan since figuring out that he was in love with him. By that point, Jonathan had already been gone for weeks. 

If seeing Jonathan in Hawkins had been overwhelming, seeing him know that he _knows_ how badly he wants to kiss him is a million times worse.

Then two smaller silhouettes are pushing past Jonathan, and El and Will spill out into the yard. The car erupts into shouting as the kids scramble out of their seatbelts and throw themselves out into the yard, sprinting across the grass towards the house. It might be the loudest thing Steve’s ever experienced, the joyful chaos of screaming and laughing as the six of them collide. Mike and Max have both grabbed onto El and the three of them have fallen into a pile on the ground while Dustin and Lucas launch themselves at Will. Steve had been harboring a dull, simmering anger since his conversation with Nancy, but now he smiles easily at seeing the kids so happy. 

And Nancy’s left the car too, he realizes—while he’s been sitting here watching the happy reunion, she’s made it all the way to the door, and now she’s wrapped so tightly in Jonathan’s arms that it seems unlikely they’ll ever be disentangled from one another. And it’s the first time, too, that he’s seen them _together_ since he figured things out. Watching them, he can’t imagine how he ever could have believed he didn’t love them both. He’s still a little mad at Nancy, sure, but stronger than that—stronger than everything—is the magnetic pull he feels, the painful tug, like there’s a string tied around one of his ribs that leads directly to the two of them and they’re yanking at it mercilessly without even noticing. 

For a second, he lets his eyes fall shut, imagining how it would feel to be over there on the porch wrapped up with the two of them. Then with a sigh he finally cuts the engine, undoes his seatbelt, and steps out of the car. 

He doesn’t go to greet anyone—there will be time for that later, once they’ve all said their hellos to the people they actually invited. Instead he goes around to the back of the car to start unloading things from the trunk. Now that he’s no longer looking directly at the two of them, the breathless buoyancy he’d felt upon first seeing Jonathan is gone as suddenly as it had come. Now his chest just feels tight, his stomach heavy and hollow. His movements are mechanical as he lifts backpacks and duffel bags from the car and sets them down on the pavement for the kids to collect. Then—

“Need a hand with those?"

He turns, and it’s Jonathan, Jonathan standing right next to him, standing so close that Steve could reach out and touch him if only he was brave enough. Jonathan, _right there_ after so many weeks of being so far away. He glances back toward the house. Nancy is still on the porch, hugging Mrs. Byers now. He looks back at Jonathan. He’s wearing that trademark sheepish smile of his, half-smirking and half-apologetic, and, god, Steve can’t fucking _breathe._

After what feels like far too long a pause, he remembers that Jonathan has asked a question, and he forces himself to answer. “I was gonna make the kids come get them. I’m already their personal driver, I’m not gonna be their busboy too.”

“Bellboy,” says Jonathan.

“What?”

“The person who carries luggage is a bellboy. Busboy is in a restaurant.”

For one single, mortifying instant, Steve feels his cheeks heating up, feels himself beginning to grow flustered. Then he realizes that Jonathan is grinning at him. Even in the dark, Steve can see the crinkles of amusement around his eyes.

The feeling inside of him at seeing that grin isn’t elation, quite. It almost feels more accurate to call it devastation. He tries to smile back, but he’s not certain it comes out any better than a grimace.

Jonathan’s smile falters and is replaced with an expression that Steve can’t quite identify. “Anyway,” he says more softly, “it’s good to see you, man.”

He grabs two of the backpacks and hoists them over his shoulders.

“Yeah,” says Steve. He bends down to pick up the others. “Yeah, it’s good to see you too.”

—

Will and El both hug him enthusiastically, but within moments of entering the house, the kids have all disappeared somewhere. Nancy and Jonathan have vanished too, presumably to Jonathan’s room. Steve tries hard not to think about that, about what might be happening in there, but he can’t help picturing it—the two of them wrapped up together, kissing, probably, or worse, without giving a second thought to Steve. For an awful, agonizing minute or two, he’s left standing alone in the front hallway, holding two backpacks that aren’t even his own in a house that also isn’t his where a bunch of people who aren’t even really his friends have just abandoned him to—what? Watch TV alone in the Byers’ living room?

Then he’s saved when Mrs. Byers comes in from the kitchen. “Hey, Steve,” she says warmly. She’s drying her hands on a towel. “You want to come help me with dinner? I don’t mean to put you to work, but—”

Steve doesn’t think he’s ever felt so relieved. “I’d love to,” he says. ****

He follows her back into the kitchen, where he can smell something cooking. “I tried to make a lasagna,” says Mrs. Byers, gesturing towards the oven. “I’m a notoriously bad cook, though, so we’ll see if it’s actually edible.”

“It smells great.”

“That’s sweet of you, but I’d save the praise for after you’ve actually tried it.” She pulls a bunch of asparagus from the fridge and holds it out to him. “Would you mind cutting these up for me?”

“Sure,” he says, taking it from her. He clears a space on the crowded counter for the cutting board that’s propped up in the sink and begins to chop.

“So,” says Mrs. Byers after a few minutes. They’ve been working in silence, Steve cutting the asparagus and Mrs. Byers spreading butter and garlic powder on slices of bread, but it’s a surprisingly comfortable silence—companionable, even, though Steve thinks it shouldn’t be, given the circumstances. He should feel distinctly awkward around Jonathan’s mom. But then again, he supposes, fighting monsters with someone probably gets rid of all the awkwardness that should normally be there. “How has Hawkins been? You holding down the fort okay?”

With Robin, or even with Nancy or Jonathan, he would probably make a joke here—something about how it’s been overrun with monsters but he’s been doing alright keeping them at bay. But Mrs. Byers has always been a nervous sort of woman, he knows, and she’s lost at least one and possibly two boyfriends to the Hawkins monsters, so joking about it seems cruel. So he just says, “Yeah, we’re doing okay.”

“And the kids? I’ve been mostly focused on my own three, obviously, but the move can’t have been easy for any of them.”

Steve thinks for awhile before answering. “They’ve been…quieter than usual,” he says eventually. “Which, I mean, that’s still really loud by most standards, but—they’re not quite the same without Will and El there.”

Mrs. Byers lets out a long, slow breath. “Yeah. Same here. And I think I’ve got the quietest two already.”

Steve laughs a little at that. “You’ve definitely got the quietest two.”

They’re quiet for another few minutes before Mrs. Byers speaks again. “And how have you been? I mean—you’ve been doing okay, with everything?”

“Yeah,” says Steve automatically. “Yeah, I’m great.”

“Steve.” The sound of her spreading butter stops suddenly and he glances over to find that she’s set down the knife and is looking up at him, serious now. “You know you can always come to me if you need anything, right? I know we’re pretty far away now, but you can always call. _Always_. I don’t regret moving, but…” She looks down again and resumes buttering. “I never wanted to leave any of you without someone older to turn to. I know you’re always there for the kids. You deserve someone to be there for you, too.”

 _I have Robin,_ he almost says, but he stops himself. That’s different and he knows it, because Robin, as much as he loves her, isn’t anything like a parental figure to him. He admires her in a million different ways, but she’s not in a position to be his role model any more than he is to be hers.

It would be nice, he thinks, to have someone like Mrs. Byers in his life. An adult, a _real_ adult, who cares about him and treats him kindly and has been through all the same shit he has. He thinks about that day, over a year ago now, and the slip of paper with a hastily scrawled phone number that Hopper had pressed into his hand. _Call if you need anything._ And the day before that, when Mrs. Byers herself patched him up after the tunnels. _Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,_ she’d said when the antiseptic she was dabbing onto his cuts had made him wince. _We’ve just gotta get this cleaned up so you don’t get an infection. I’m almost done, I promise._ Next to her, Hopper had been digging through an ancient-looking first aid kit for some more appropriate badges than the tiny ones the kids had slapped on when he was unconscious. As much pain as he’d been in, he wishes he could go back to that moment, to that feeling of being taken care of almost as if by parents, even if in reality it was the grouchy Chief of Police and his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend’s mom.

“Thanks,” he says quietly.

Mrs. Byers smiles up at him, warm and a little sad. “You’re welcome, Steve.”

He turns back to his chopping, blinking rapidly to dispel the sudden dampness in his eyes. “How’s work?” he asks, hoping she won’t comment on the sudden change of subject.

She doesn’t. She just launches into a detailed story of a particularly belligerent customer who had come in the other day, and Steve can’t help but smile.

—

It’s a miracle that, come dinner time, that he and Mrs. Byers manage to wrangle all six kids into sitting down at the table. They’re not sitting _still,_ of course, but they’re all there, squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder around the tiny kitchen table that definitely isn’t meant to accommodate more than four. The Byers don’t even own enough chairs for this much company—Jonathan is a few inches lower than everyone else in a soft foldable lawn chair, and Will is perched on top of what Steve is pretty sure is a small end table that’s been dragged in from the living room—but he can’t remember the last time he participated in something that felt so distinctly like a family dinner.

“So how is everything with you guys?” asks Mrs. Byers eventually, interrupting the extremely hard-to-follow discussion that the kids have continued from before dinner. “How is high school?”

“Fantastic,” says Dustin, at the same time as Max says, _“Boring._ ” ****

“Boring?” Mrs. Byers repeats with a smile. “I don’t believe that.”

“The classes are stupid and the people are stupider,” says Max.

In a rare moment of agreement, Mike says, “She’s right.”

Nancy rolls her eyes. “Mike just doesn’t want anyone to know he’s lame enough to actually enjoy something.”

“He enjoys me,” says El, and then calmly takes a bit of lasagna, apparently completely oblivious to the way Mike is blushing so hard he’s almost purple and even Mrs. Byers is struggling to stifle a laugh.

Steve grins to himself. He hasn’t seen El acting so carefree in months; the few times he’d seen her in Hawkins between Starcourt and her moving, she’d been quiet, pale, withdrawn. Now she seems almost like herself again. The thought makes his chest feel warm and soft and he can’t help but smile fondly at her. When she catches his expression, she smiles back.

The warmth in his chest doesn’t last, though. He tries to focus on the kids and the stories they’re enthusiastically telling each other and Mrs. Byers, but he can’t keep his eyes off Nancy and Jonathan, who are sitting directly across from him, pressed together from hip to shoulder. He’d expected to feel jealous and miserable all through dinner, watching the two of them whisper to each other, but the reality, he’s finding, is even worse. Because Nancy and Jonathan aren’t whispering together at all. Instead, every time he glances at them, they’re just _looking_ at him. They look serious, for some reason—much more serious than Steve would expect from them after what he assumes has just been an hour of vigorous lovemaking. ****

He’s happy to be here. He is. He’s happy to see all the kids together, as much as it hurts he’s _elated_ to see Jonathan, but—throughout all of dinner, he feels his emotions continue to rise into something that definitely isn’t joy. He already felt stupidly weepy and vulnerable after his conversation with Mrs. Byers. Now, sitting across from Nancy and Jonathan, he’s just so exhausted and so jealous and so irrationally angry and so completely, desperately in love with them that it’s a miracle, he thinks, that he’s managed not to either burst into tears or just start screaming. ****

And they won’t stop fucking staring at him.

After dinner, he offers to do the cleaning—insists on it, actually, even when Mrs. Byers tries to fight him on it. “It’s the least I can do for having a hand in dumping four extra infants on you over the holidays,” he tells her, going as far as to hold the sponge over his head when she tries to take it from him. She laughs at that, putting up her hands in surrender. Steve would have done it no matter what the circumstances—anything to make up for all the inconvenience he’s causing Mrs. Byers—but right now, he isn’t just trying to be polite. He needs something to do, something to distract himself from Nancy and Jonathan. He needs these few minutes alone in the kitchen to calm himself down.

But the Nancy and Jonathan aren’t leaving.

He isn’t sure how exactly he knows, standing at the sink with his back to the rest of the kitchen, that they haven’t exited the room with Mrs. Byers and the kids. It’s almost as if he can feel their presence, like a tingling on the back of his neck. When he turns to confirm it, he finds that they’re both just standing next to the table, watching him.

“I’ve got it, guys,” he tells them, “really.” When they still don’t move, he feels the annoyance spike in him. It’s that same bitterness from earlier, when Nancy had asked in the car whether he still loved her. “Don’t you have, like, a month and a half of sex to be catching up on right now?”

He says it harshly, much more harshly than he means to, and he regrets it the moment it leaves his mouth. He turns away from them, back to the sink, scrubbing aggressively. Behind him, he hears only stunned silence.

Then Nancy says coolly, “We were wondering if you wanted to come out with us, actually.”

His hands go still. That certainly wasn’t what he was expecting. He turns slowly back towards them, trying to figure out if he could have heard her properly. Out? Out where? Out _why?_

Nancy has her arms crossed, a defiant look on her face, as if she’s challenged him to something—which really, Steve thinks, is kind of what this feels like. It’s like a trick question, and Steve can’t quite figure out which part is the trick.

Jonathan, for some reason, looks a little hurt. He must not have wanted Steve to go out with them, Steve realizes. And why would he? It can’t have been his idea to share his first date in months with Nancy’s ex-boyfriend. But when he speaks, it’s just to say, in an infuriatingly neutral voice, “We were thinking about going rollerskating. There’s a rink nearby that rents skates.”

Steve stares for a long moment, looking back and forth between the two of them. They can’t possibly be serious. And yet they don’t look at all like they’re joking—they look, in fact, far graver than he thinks is normal for two people who have just asked a friend if he wants to go rollerskating with them. “Uh,” he says. “Rollerskating?”

“I’ve been meaning to teach Jonathan,” says Nancy. “I thought maybe I could teach you too? Unless you already know how.”

“I—no, I don’t know how. I mean, I’ve never been. I—”

“Good,” says Nancy, “that’s settled, then. We’ll help you with the dishes and then we’ll go.”

It’s not settled. Nothing about this is settled. Steve hasn’t even said _yes_ yet, for fuck’s sake, and he’s not completely sure he was going to. But all the same, he finds himself nodding. “Sure,” he says. He’s shocked at how calm-sounding his own voice is. It doesn’t seem like it could possibly have come from him, not when his heart his pounding and his palms are sweating and he feels a little disoriented, like he either just woke up or is about to pass out. “Here, pass me that pan.”

_—_

The skating rink is at the very edge of the town. It’s about a ten minute drive from the Byers’ house, and the ride over, with Steve in the backseat of Jonathan’s beat up old car and Nancy in the passenger seat, is agonizingly quiet. Jonathan fiddles with the radio a few times, but the signal is bad, and it keeps cutting to static. After awhile he just turns it off entirely, leaving the three of them in complete silence.

None of them speak until they’re at the ticket window and Jonathan pulls out his wallet. “Oh—” says Steve, reaching for his own. “Here, no, I’ve got it—”

“Don’t be stupid,” says Jonathan, “we invited you.”

“Yeah, well, you drove us here so I—”

“And you drove all the way from Hawkins—”

“But you’re hosting—”

“Too late,” says Nancy, and they both look over to see her already accepting change from the bored-looking cashier.

“ _Nance._ ”

Steve and Jonathan look at each other, startled. They’ve both said her name at the exact same time, and—Steve feels his neck heat up—in the exact same way. All exasperation and fondness. More fondness than should be acceptable coming from Steve. Is that why the look on Jonathan’s face is so strange?

Nancy rolls her eyes. “Come on. You guys can pay for drinks or something.”

The rink is different than Steve expected. He’d been picturing it full of screaming children, or at least younger teenagers, stumbling on their skates as they tried to dance to overwhelmingly loud pop hits. He’d imagined it being kind of terrible, honestly.

But the rink is almost empty. There’s one other couple making slow, lazy loops, and a young woman practicing much fancier moves on her own, but other than that, it’s deserted. The radio is quiet, playing a song Steve doesn’t recognize. There are no bright, obnoxious lights. It’s calm, it’s dimly lit, it’s—

Steve swallows hard.

It’s almost _romantic._

They’re quiet again as they check out their skates and put them on, quiet as they make their way—Steve and Jonathan both wobblingly, Nancy with much more grace—across the carpet to the rink’s entrance. Then, suddenly, Nancy grabs both of their hands and says with an air of grim determination, “Let’s do this.”

He hardly has time to process the fact that he’s _holding Nancy’s hand_ before she’s pulling him forward, out onto the rink, and the ground is suddenly much more slippery and he can’t do anything but grip her hand tightly because otherwise he’s going to fall, and then he’s gliding forward, not skating himself so much as just being pulled along by Nancy’s momentum, and on her other side Jonathan is doing the same, looking just as lost as Steve feels, and he catches Steve’s eye, and something in Steve’s expression must betray how utterly off-balance he is because then Jonathan’s laughing, laughing so hard that he’s doubled over, and Steve can’t help it—he’s laughing too, harder than he has in weeks, and Nancy is looking back and forth between them with a look of utter bewilderment which only makes them laugh harder, and then Nancy starts to laugh, too, and then her laugh turns into a shriek as she cries out, “Oh, shit!” and before Steve can register what she’s swearing about, he feels himself begin to tip, and then he’s on the ground, all three of them are, and they’re all sitting flat on their asses in the middle of the rink, laughing so hard that Steve’s sure he’s not the only one with tears starting to stream down his face.

“Jesus,” says Nancy, once she’s caught her breath. “You guys are _terrible_ at this.”

“It was Jonathan’s fault,” Steve says automatically.

“Hey!” cries Jonathan indignantly. “You were the one who fell first.”

“Actually, I think it’s Nancy’s fault. She was supposed to _teach_ us to skate, not just drag us out here with no instruction.”

Jonathan grins. “Yeah. Definitely Nancy’s fault.”

“Well, it won’t be Nancy’s fault if you assholes get run over just sitting here in the middle of the rink,” she says. She stands and holds out her hands to them. “Come on. Again.”

So they go again.

They make it two laps this time before falling again, and then another four, before Nancy shouts, “Time to switch!” And then she lets go of both their hands, moving to Steve’s other side, so that suddenly Steve is completely unmoored. Without thinking, he reaches his hands out for support, and it’s not until he’s caught his balance again that he realizes. He’s grabbed onto Nancy’s hand. And Jonathan’s.

He’s spent many, many hours over the course of the past few months thinking about Nancy’s hands—what they look like, what they feel like in his own. Holding her hand again tonight for the first time in so long has felt like falling into a comfortable routine, like seeing a familiar face, like getting home at the end of a long day. It’s exhilarating, but also safe. Comfortable.

Holding Jonathan’s hand is different. He’s pretty sure he’s never even touched Jonathan before, other than that one brilliant, desperate moment of violence more than two years ago now. It feels like an electric shock is running through him, radiating out from all the places where his skin is touching Jonathan’s. His hand is bigger than Nancy’s—of course it is—but it fits just as well. It fits perfectly.

He tries to loosen his grip.

Jonathan doesn’t let him go.

Steve turns his head to stare at Jonathan, but he’s looking straight ahead still—almost like he’s deliberately not meeting Steve’s gaze. He doesn’t look happy, Steve realizes. In fact, he almost looks _angry._ But Steve can’t imagine why. If it was about holding hands with Steve, he’d have let Steve pull away. And it can’t be about Steve holding Nancy’s hand, can it? Jonathan hadn’t seemed to have a problem with it before.

He doesn’t ask. He tries to tell himself that it’s out of respect, that he doesn’t want to pry, but he knows that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that he’s terrified of saying something that will make either of them let go. So he goes along with their silence, skating through this song and the next, trying to memorize the feeling of their hands in his—Jonathan’s rough and a little sweaty, Nancy’s small and smooth—because he’s certain he’ll never feel them again after tonight, and god, why did they have to go skating of all things? There’s no other activity on the planet that would lead to all three of them holding hands. Maybe it was intentional, he thinks wildly. Maybe it’s some kind of test, to see how well he’s able to control himself around Nancy. Maybe Jonathan’s intentionally pushing Steve to his limits, trying to figure out how much he can trust him around his girlfriend. But that can’t be it. Even Jonathan and Nancy, who have broken his heart a thousand times over, would never do something so deliberately cruel.

“We should go,” says Steve eventually. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want this night to end, _ever_ , because this is basically a date with them, or at least the closest he’ll ever get. But it’s getting late and he’s starting to panic and he’s not sure how much more of this he can take without completely losing his mind. “I don’t want to worry your mom.”

“She’ll be okay,” says Jonathan. “She’s not expecting us back till late.”

“But—”

“Steve,” says Nancy. She squeezes his hand and he looks down at her, finds her looking up at him with those wide, pleading eyes that he could never say no to for anything. “Just one more song? Please.”

He lets out a long breath. He’s already in this deep. “Yeah, okay. One more song.”

—

It’s late when they return, and the house is quiet. The ride back had been quiet, too, but not like it was on the way there—it was a comfortable, sleepy sort of quiet this time, and Steve had lain his head against the window, managing to ignore his heartache enough to feel almost content. Maybe, he’d thought, just maybe, he could make it work, being friends with the two of them. It would hurt like hell. But for nights like this one, nights full of laughter and teasing and their eyes so warm and bright on his, it might be worth it.

After Jonathan locks the door behind them, Steve pauses. Jonathan and Nancy, he assumes, are about to retreat to Jonathan’s room; Steve is planning to crash on the couch, where he’s already deposited his duffel bag. “Well—night,” he says a little awkwardly. “I’ll, uh, I’ll see you guys in the morning, I guess. Thanks for taking me skating. It was fun.”

Before either of them answer, he turns to head into the living room. But then Nancy reaches out and touches his arm, just barely, and he turns back to look at her, a question on his lips. But she doesn’t say anything. She’s just _looking_ at him, and it’s _that_ face, the same face he remembers so clearly from that very first night at his house when she so shyly pulled her shirt off—so vulnerable and earnest, all at once. His heart catches in his throat. He has to look away from her, but when he looks away he finds himself looking at Jonathan instead, and the expression on his face is so—so—so _tender,_ almost. So soft, and so fond. And he’s not looking at Nancy. He’s looking at Steve.

God, he wants to kiss him. To kiss him and to kiss Nancy, too—it would be so, so easy. He could just step forward, not even a full foot, and pull both of them close, and never let them go again. His mouth goes dry at the thought. He feels like all the blood is rushing to his head. His heart, he realizes, is pounding so hard that he’s sure they must be able to hear it. He licks his lips. Clears his throat. And he feels tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, because god, this isn’t _fair._ It’s not fair that they get to look at him like this and they don’t even have any idea what it does to him. Or maybe they do know, and that’s worse somehow, because even if they know, they certainly don’t love him back, unless they do, but they _don’t,_ he _knows_ they don’t, and—he wills his voice to stay steady, but still, he’s certain that it’s shaking a bit as he bites out, “What is this?”

“Steve,” whispers Nancy, and then she steps forward.

For the tiniest, briefest of moments, he feels her hand brushing against his.

And then he bursts into tears.

Nancy jumps back, startled. “Steve?” she says again, softly, a question this time. “Steve—what’s wrong? What’s going on?”

 _What’s going on is I love you!_ he wants to shout. He’s not sure of the exact moment that it became true, whether it was two years ago or two months ago or this very second, but he knows this now: that he loves Nancy and Jonathan with every single piece of himself, and knowing that they cannot possibly love him back is destroying him so thoroughly that, in this moment, he cannot even begin to fathom how he will survive it. 

He’s pressed his hands over his face, knowing that there’s no way he could possibly conceal his crying now but unable to bear seeing their faces, all wide-eyed with concern. They wouldn’t be looking at him like that if they knew why he was so upset. They wouldn’t even want to be in the same room as him.

But then he feels a hand over one of his, pulling it away from his face, and he cannot bring himself to resist when Jonathan curls Steve’s fingers in his own, holding on tightly. “Steve,” he says, barely above a whisper, “talk to us.”

“I don’t—I can’t—” He tries to take a breath but his lungs won’t cooperate, contracting immediately to force the air back out. “I—”

“Shh,” says Jonathan, and Steve feels a hysterical laugh bubble up in him unbidden because Jonathan literally _just_ told him to talk. “You’re okay, man, it’s—whatever it is, we’ll figure it out, okay? We’ll figure it out.”

Nancy moves towards him again. “You’re alright,” she murmurs. She takes his other hand.

Then without another word, both hands are tugging him away from the living room and down the hall and into another room, smaller and dim. Steve doesn’t register until they’ve sat him down that this must be Jonathan’s bedroom. He must be on Jonathan’s bed. 

They sit down on either side of him, neither letting go of his hands. This should be comforting, he thinks. This should be _heaven,_ having both of them holding onto him, all their attention focused on making him feel better. But it’s not. It’s fucking miserable, because they don’t _know_. For a few long, agonizing minutes, he just sits there, resolutely ignoring them, just trying to get his breathing under control.

When Nancy raises a hand to brush his hair out of his face, he flinches back, startled. Momentarily forgetting that he’s trying to ignore them so that he can calm down, he looks down into her face. She’s looking up at him with all the gentleness in the world.

“Steve,” she says softly. “Let us take care of you.”

“Why?” he asks, his voice cracking.

Jonathan’s hand starts rubbing soothing circles on his back. “Because we—” He swallows hard. “We care about you.”

 _Why?_ Steve wants to ask again, but before his lips can form the word, Nancy is speaking.

“We love you,” she whispers. 

The half-second after she says it feels to Steve like an eternity. He’s hyper-aware, suddenly—whereas just moments ago the rest of the world had been muffled by the sheer strength of Nancy and Jonathan’s presence, now he can distinguish the dripping of water in a pipe somewhere, the faintest breeze outside the window, the slight creaking of the bed as Nancy shifts her weight. Most of all, he’s aware that Jonathan’s hand between his shoulder blades is no longer moving. 

There is a terrible, swollen silence.

Then—“I’m sorry,” says Nancy, sounding wrecked. “I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry.”

Earlier, in the living room, when Steve had looked at Nancy and Jonathan and known that he would never hear them say those words to him, he had thought it was the worst he could possibly feel. He’d been unable to imagine a sharper pain. He had been wrong. This—hearing Nancy say that they love him and then immediately take it back—this, he thinks, is a thousand times worse.

He stands up suddenly, surprising even himself. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say until he’s saying it, the words spilling out of him like something poisonous and vile. “I can’t fucking do this,” he spits. “I can’t—I’m trying so fucking hard, Nance, but I can’t keep—I can’t—I shouldn’t have come here, I’m sorry I came, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

Nancy just looks back at him, her eyes wide and full of tears of her own now, and Jonathan stands up too. For a moment, Steve thinks he’s crossed a line. Swearing at Nancy was unacceptable, too much even for Jonathan, who is more patient and understanding than anyone Steve’s ever met, and now Jonathan is going to throw him out, and Steve doesn’t even blame him. He steps closer to Steve. And then before Steve quite knows what’s happening, Jonathan is reaching for him, wrapping his arms around him and guiding his head to rest in the crook of his neck and holding him tightly, and then, finally, it’s all just too much. Steve feels a sob bubble up from deep inside him, and then another, and then he’s sobbing uncontrollably into Jonathan’s shoulder while Jonathan’s strong, gentle hands rub up and down his back.

At some point Nancy stands too, presses herself to his back, and there are gentle hushing noises in his ears, hands stroking through his hair. And then, when he’s finally out of tears and goes limp against Jonathan, completely exhausted, he feels himself being maneuvered so that he’s lying on the bed between them, his face still pressed into Jonathan’s chest, Nancy still a warm weight against his back.

“We’ve got you,” whispers Nancy. Her breath tickles the back of his neck and he feels himself go limp in sheer, overwhelming relief. “We’ve got you.”

“We’ve got you,” Jonathan echoes.

So often it feels like the opposite is true. Like Jonathan and Nancy are the reason for all the ways he’s hurting, like they dragged him into the whole monster mess and then left him to cope with it on his own, like they broke his heart again and again and again, without even realizing it, before even _Steve_ realized it. Like they’re destined to just bring chaos into his life, and heartache, and pain. Nancy and Jonathan are terrible for him, he knows. They always have been. Always will be.

But he’s just too tired to care about any of that now. And he’s never felt so comfortable as he does lying here, sandwiched between them. He’s never felt so safe. So when Nancy says it again, a soft _we’ve got you_ whispered into the base of his neck, he lets his eyes fall shut. He lets himself believe them.

—

He can’t have been asleep for long, he thinks. It’s still dark out, and his mouth only tastes a little bit terrible even though he definitely didn’t brush his teeth before falling apart in Nancy and Jonathan’s arms. But even so—he’s never felt so rested as he does now, waking up still pressed between them, held close by them both. He feels lighter somehow, like something sickly has been leeched from him. _Catharsis,_ Robin had called it once after they watched a movie together that made them both cry. This feels like that, only a million times stronger.

The longer he lies there, though, the less at peace he feels. There’s a sickening guilt that’s getting harder and harder to ignore. Because he knows they aren’t doing this out of love for him, or at least not the same kind of love he feels. They’re doing it because they’re kind, and good friends, and they would never leave him alone when he was so upset. And here he is, taking advantage of that kindness, letting himself pretend that they feel more than they really do, relishing the feeling of their arms around him, their warm, solid bodies pressed so close as he lies between them in Jonathan’s bed. They’re just doing this for him as his friends. And he wants so badly for it to be something more than that that he’s _aching_ with it, a dense, physical pain pressing in on his lungs from all sides.

Then he feels Nancy shift a little behind him. She makes a soft noise that sends his chest into spasms and stretches a little, and then says quietly, “Steve? You awake?”

For a moment, he considers pretending not to be. Anything to prolong them lying here with him. But the guilt is almost overpowering now, so he swallows hard and says gruffly, “Yeah.”

“How are you feeling?”

He considers carefully. “Better, I guess.”

“That’s good.” It’s Jonathan who says it, his voice rumbling through Steve from all the points where they’re touching. Steve isn’t sure if Jonathan has just now woken or if he’s been awake this whole time. Selfishly, he hopes it’s the latter. He hopes that Jonathan has continued to hold him like this because he wanted to, not just because he fell asleep like that.

He feels Nancy begin to run her fingers through his hair, and if he wasn’t so completely out of tears, he thinks the gentleness of it might make him cry again. “No pressure,” she says, “but do you wanna tell us what happened?”

Yes. He wants to tell them. He wants to tell them so desperately that he’s a little worried it’ll just slip out, completely against his will. But he knows he can’t do that, not if he wants them to keep treating him like this, with such careful, affectionate attention. “I’m just…tired,” he says. It’s not a lie, exactly. “It’s just…everything is a lot, you know? With all the monster shit, and it’s happened so many times now that it would be stupid to think it won’t happen again, and I’m so afraid for the kids, because they’re so fucking _young,_ and…and it’s been hard, you know? And I’m so freaked out about the kids, it just feels like…like I’m kind of on my own, sometimes.”

“I get it,” says Jonathan. “I feel the same way.”

“Me too,” says Nancy.

“Yeah, well.” Steve tries hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but he isn’t sure he quite manages. “At least you two have each other.”

There’s a pause then, and Steve feels Nancy pull away slightly. When she speaks, though, she doesn’t sound hurt or angry, just confused. “What about Robin?”

“It’s not the same,” he tells her.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not—I mean, she’s my best friend, and I love her, but I’m not _in_ love with her. So it feels different. It’s not like this.”

“Wait,” says Jonathan. He pulls away too, a little, enough that Steve can look up into his face instead of just at his chest. “You and Robin aren’t dating?”

And in spite of himself, in spite of everything, Steve can’t help but laugh a little at that. He uses the space Nancy and Jonathan have given him to roll onto his back, looking up at the ceiling. “Jesus, no,” he says. Robin’s secret isn’t his to tell, but over the last few months, he’s come to realize that there are a million other reasons they could never date, a million other things that made Steve’s crush die a quick, painless death. “She’s like my sister,” he says honestly. “Or, like, my soulmate, except not romantically. She’s…she’s the best fucking thing that’s ever happened to me, honestly, but in a totally non-romantic way. It’s like—wait, Nance, you knew this already. I said in the car, remember? To Dustin?”

She’s silent for a long moment, and then Steve feels the best shift as she sits up. “I thought…I just thought, you know, you didn’t want to admit to a fourteen-year-old that you had your girlfriend sleeping over.”

He laughs again, picturing how he’d held Robin through a post-nightmare panic attack and then she’d teased him about Nancy and Jonathan. “We were having, like, the opposite of sex.”

“So you’re…” Jonathan clears his throat. He’s sitting up too, now. “You’re single.”

“I mean, yes?” says Steve. He isn’t _wrong,_ of course, but still, it feels a little bit like he’s rubbing salt in a wound. He doesn’t need fucking Jonathan of all people to remind him of how lonely he is. Not wanting to be the only one left lying down, he sits too, leaning back against the headboard between them.

“Wait,” says Nancy slowly. Steve looks over at her. She’s got a look of intense concentration on her face. “You said…you and Robin, you said it’s not like this.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not in love with her?”

“I am not.”

“And that’s what makes it…” Nancy swallows hard, looking up at him. “You not being in love with her, that’s what makes it…not like this?”

And Steve realizes, then, what he’s said. He feels panic rising in him, feels his palms grow sweaty. “I didn’t—“ he starts, without any idea how he plans on finishing that sentence.

Nancy cuts him off. “Steve,” she says, so quietly that he can barely hear her. “Steve, do you…do you love us?”

He looks down at her, his throat constricting. She doesn’t look angry.

He turns to face Jonathan. He’s staring back at Steve in stunned silence, his mouth open slightly as if he was about to say something but suddenly lost the ability to speak. And he doesn’t look angry any more than Nancy does. He doesn’t look repulsed, doesn’t look pitying.

There are too many things happening in Steve’s chest, in his stomach. A rising feeling, a breathless buoyancy that leaves him dizzy, a warmth spreading through him that somehow makes him shiver. He is very aware of his own heartbeat, not panicked and fast like it was last night but slow, steady, unfathomably calm.

They know, and they aren’t turning away from him in disgust. They _know,_ and they look almost…

“I—” he starts, but then he’s interrupted by a sudden knock at the door, frantic-sounding, that startles him into sitting up straight. The door is thrown open and Mrs. Byers is there, and Steve doesn’t have a single second to be embarrassed about being caught in her son’s bed—though why should he be, nothing _happened,_ and isn’t that the whole problem?—because she’s white and shaking as she says loudly, “Get up. Get up _now,_ come on, this is urgent.”

“What?” says Jonathan, already half out of bed, starting towards her. “Mom, what’s going on, is everyone okay? Did something happen?”

“Robin called—she’s talking to Dustin now—she said—”

All the exhilaration floods out of Steve as quickly as it had come, replaced with a dull, restless sort of dread.

“We need to get back to Hawkins. Right now.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _When you’re lovers in a dangerous time  
>  Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime  
> Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight  
> Gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight_

“ _What?_ ” Jonathan has his mom by the wrist now, holding on gently. Through the haze of his panic, Steve can see clearly the image of what Jonathan is like at home, what he is to his family—the rational one, the pragmatist, always ready to take charge even when his mother is there. “Are you sure? What did Robin say?”

“She—” starts Mrs. Byers, but then Will runs into the room so quickly that he almost barrels into her.

“I can’t find Steve!” he shouts. “Where is—” Then he stops in his tracks, staring at Steve, who’s still sitting up in Jonathan’s bed next to Nancy. “Oh.”

He’s giving Steve an unreadable look that reminds him inexplicably of Robin—eyebrows raised and mouth slightly open as if there’s something he wants to say but isn’t sure how to phrase it—but now isn’t the moment to wonder about it. Steve feels himself unfreeze, his shock at Mrs. Byers’ words dissipating, and he stands up quickly. “Is Robin okay?” he demands of no one in particular. He fixes his gaze on Mrs. Byers. “ _Is she okay?_ ”

“Yes, I think so, she—”

“We need to leave!” Mike’s appeared in the doorway, El pressed close to his side, Lucas and Max just behind them. “We need to leave _right now!_ ”

“What the hell’s going _on?_ ” Nancy asks her brother. She stands quickly, shoving her feet into her shoes and fumbling to dig her keys out of her purse. Steve does the same, wondering when, in the chaos of last night, he had even taken his shoes off in the first place. He can’t remember it at all.

“We don’t know, but she said we need to come back—something about Murray—”

“Murray _Bauman?_ ” says Jonathan incredulously.

Nancy freezes. “He’s certifiably insane. I swear to god, if this is some—”

“Listen, I don’t _know_ what it is, but Robin sounded serious! Thi _s_ is a real Code Red!” And then Mike is off running, the rest of the kids close behind him, and Mrs. Byers spares them one last frantic look before she takes off too.

 _“Shit,_ ” says Nancy before she makes to follow them, and Steve has nothing to add. _Shit_ seems to about sum it up.

In the kitchen, Dustin is still on the phone, listening intently. He looks up when the rest of them enter. “Okay, got it, everyone’s up, we’re leaving right now. Try not to die before we get to Hawkins.”

Steve starts toward him, ready to grab the phone out of his hands so that he can hear Robin’s voice for himself, demand to know that she’s okay. But before he can get there, Dustin hangs up. “Hey!” Steve shouts. “I wanted to—”

“Your girlfriend will be fine, Steve,” Dustin says briskly, bending to put on the shoes that Will has dropped at his feet. “I’ll explain everything on the way. Now let’s _go!_ ”

—

The drive back to Hawkins is nothing like yesterday’s drive away from it. It’s the middle of the night still—probably around three in the morning, Steve thinks, though checking a clock had been low on the list of priorities as they ran frantically from the house—and the roads are dark and deserted around them, a sharp contrast with the chaos inside the two cars hurtling north at what must be double the speed limit. Steve has ended up in Nancy’s passenger seat again, half the kids in their backseat and the other half with Jonathan and Joyce just ahead.

In the backseat, Dustin is yelling—an endless stream of _oh my god oh my god oh my god_ that sets Steve’s teeth on edge, but he doesn’t tell the kid to stop. It seems like an appropriate reaction. Beside Dustin, Max and Lucas are bickering loudly about how long they think it’ll take to get there. Lucas says at least seven hours; Max insists that, at the speed they’re going, it couldn’t possibly be more than five.

“Unless we’re pulled over,” says Lucas, “which is _definitely_ going to happen at this rate—”

“We’re in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, no one’s gonna—”

“We still have fucking cops out here, just because it’s not California doesn’t mean—”

“Shut up!” shouts Nancy. “I can’t focus.”

Her words remind Steve of Max’s, when she’d kidnapped him and driven them all to the tunnels. He’d been terrified then, waking up in the middle of everything with a pounding headache and no idea what was going on, but it’s somehow worse this time. Then, at least, no one had been alone, and even if _he_ didn’t know what was happening, the kids seemed to. Now, they know nothing. Nothing except the fact that Robin is alone and in danger and if anything happens to her, it’ll be hours before they even find out.

Jesus Christ. He remembers his reluctance to leave her, how he’d had to push the fear of another monster invasion from his mind before they left Hawkins. He should have taken that fear more seriously. Should have _known_ that something like this might happen. Should never have left her alone.

If Robin dies, it’ll be his fault.

He turns around and interrupts Dustin’s frantic mantra, desperate the give his mind something else to focus on. “You said you’d explain on the way.”

“Oh, yeah—” Dustin ducks down to rummage in his backpack, pulling out his radio. “Will! Mike! El!” he shouts. “Does anyone copy?”

“What are you—”

He waves a hand at Steve to silence him. “The others need to know too and I’m not explaining twice.” Then, into the radio again: “ _Does anyone_ —”

“We’re here.” Mike’s voice is crackly and distant-sounding, even though he’s really just a few yards away in the other car. “We’re here. What’s going on? Over.”

“I said I’d explain in the car. So Robin didn’t know much what’s going on, but apparently that Murray guy called her house this morning—”

“Wait, how does he have her number?” interrupts Steve.

“I don’t know, does that _matter_? Anyway, Murray got in touch with Robin because none of the rest of us were around and he apparently hasn’t been able to reach Mrs. Byers—”

Mrs. Byers’ voice comes faintly through the radio. “I had his number blocked. He kept calling about nothing, just dredging it all back up, and I didn’t want…I didn’t think…” She sounds vaguely apologetic.

“Doesn’t matter now!” says Dustin. “Bottom line is, something important is happening in Hawkins and it’s important that Mrs. Byers talks to Murray in person and if this is some Upside Down shit again then it’s probably important the rest of us are there too. And it’s urgent.”

“Wait,” says Nancy, her voice raised a bit to make sure she can be heard through the radio. “ _If_ this is some Upside Down shit? You mean we might be running back to Hawkins for nothing?”

“I told you, Robin didn’t know much. She just said we had to get there as quick as possible.”

“But what if she’s—”

Steve cuts her off. “Robin wouldn’t lie,” he says. “And she wouldn’t call if she didn’t think it was serious.” He’d given her the Byers’ number a few days before leaving, instructed her to call if anything happened. _Nothing’s going to happen, dingus._

Will says something then, and Dustin answers, but there’s no more useful information—it’s just devolved into speculation and bickering, and Steve tunes it out.

At least Robin’s with Murray, he thinks, though he wishes he could find more comfort in that fact. Last time one of their party was off with Murray, he didn’t come back alive.

—

It’s the worst seven hours of Steve’s life, including all the time he spent locked in an underground Russian fortress. It’s almost laughable, how worked up he was over the car ride yesterday. Spending so long alone with Nancy—that was _nothing._ He’d do it again, every day if he had to, if it meant that he would never have to experience _this_ again. He’d let her ask him a thousand times whether he was still in love with her. He’d let her gush about Jonathan to him. _Anything._

Then he remembers suddenly what happened last night. What happened this morning. It’s not that he forgot, exactly, but in his haze of panic over Robin it’s hardly crossed his mind. _Do you love us?_ It hadn’t been a confession that _they_ love _him._ Not even close. But the way she said it, and the look on Jonathan’s face—

It isn’t the time for all that, though. He feels a little like he’s losing his mind, fixating alternately on Nancy and Jonathan and on Robin’s safety. It’s obvious which one of those takes priority right now. He has no idea if Robin’s okay, if she’s even _alive,_ has no idea what’s happening in Hawkins or whether they’ll get there in time to help her. And yet somehow, as if his brain knows that thinking too hard about what she might be battling right now—another gate, more of those Demodogs, the goddamn Russians—his mind keeps jumping back to that conversation in Jonathan’s bed in the middle of the night. He latches onto it not with pleasure, exactly, but with some kind of frantic relief.

The relief doesn’t last more than a moment at a time. Robin—the best person he knows, his closest friend, the light of his goddamn life—could be dead already and they _wouldn’t fucking know._ ****

The moment they pass the _Now Entering Hawkins_ sign, Dustin is yelling into the radio, not wanting to waste a single second that they might be in range for Robin’s radio to pick it up. Thank god the little shits had goaded her into buying one a few months back, Steve thinks. _For the next apocalypse,_ Max had said. It had been a joke back then.

It isn’t a joke now.

The next few minutes are agonizing, with Dustin’s repeated calls of _Robin, do you copy?_ going unanswered. Every second of staticky silence causes Steve’s heart to plummet just a little farther toward his stomach. His fists are clenched, he realizes, nails digging painfully into his palms. They’re in range by now, they must be, they _must_ be, and if Robin isn’t answering—

“Steve,” says Nancy, quietly enough that only he can hear. It’s the first word she’s spoken in hours. “Breathe. I’m sure she’s okay.”

Is he not breathing? That must be why he’s so dizzy suddenly, why his chest is aching and nothing makes sense. He lets out a shaky laugh that might be more of a whimper, and he wishes he had it in him to be embarrassed about that right now. He thinks rather hysterically that if he keeps this up, keeps being so pathetic every time Nancy or Jonathan show him the slightest kindness, he’s going to kill whatever they might possibly have before it even really starts. “If she isn’t—”

“Yeah, I copy.”

Steve feels his whole body go limp with relief at the sound of her voice, barely understandable at this distance but undeniably alive. Nancy glances away from the road to flash him a brief smile, and if he wasn’t already so overwhelmed with emotion at Robin’s words, he knows that Nancy looking at him like that would make him lightheaded. ****

“Yes! Robin!” Dustin shouts. “We’re here, we’re in Hawkins, where do you need us to go?”

Her voice is garbled and staticky with distance, and Dustin has to ask her to repeat herself. After a couple tries, Steve’s able to make out her words. “Family Video.”

“Copy that.”

“What the fuck?” mutters Lucas. “Why is she at work?”

“She’s not actually _working,_ though, is she?” asks Max. “I mean, if we came all this way and it wasn’t even a big enough crisis to keep her home from work—”

“She’s not working,” interrupt Steve and Nancy at the same time. Steve looks at her incredulously. “How do _you_ know that?”

“It’s Thanksgiving,” says Nancy, with the air of someone stating the obvious.

And it _is_ obvious, Steve supposes. He’d forgotten the holiday entirely—it hadn’t even crossed his mind since he woke up. Briefly, nonsensically, he regrets that they’re all missing the Thanksgiving dinner that the Byers probably had planned.

“We’re about ten minutes away, I think,” Nancy says. “Dustin, radio the other car and make sure they caught that.”

Steve stares out the window as Dustin complies. He wills the scenery to fly by faster. ****

— ****

There’s only one car in the Family Video parking lot—Murray’s, Steve supposes. Robin still doesn’t have a car of her own, and the familiar bicycle is nowhere in sight. He doesn’t know Murray like the others do—doesn’t know anything about him, really, except that he helped Nancy and Jonathan shut down the lab and he came back alive when Hopper didn’t—but for some reason, the thought of Robin alone in a car with him puts Steve on edge. He must be alright if Nancy and Jonathan trust him, but to Steve he looks like a textbook kidnapper-rapist, the sort of man whose picture would be shown as a warning example during the stranger-danger presentations Steve remembers from grade school. ****

This completely irrational train of thought lasts only until Nancy has brought the car screeching to a halt, poorly parked across two separate spaces. Steve flings open the door almost before the car’s stopped moving. Without even pausing to make sure everyone else is behind him, he runs to store entrance— _Closed Thanksgiving,_ a handwritten sign reminds him—and tries to throw open the door. It doesn’t budge.

“Is it locked?” asks Mrs. Byers as he tugs on it.

“Yeah.” He doesn’t know what exactly he imagined waiting for them here, but it definitely involved billowing smoke and a darker sky and at least some evidence of another monster apocalypse. This ordinary, silent parking lot of a Family Video closed for the holiday is almost more unnerving. He wonders desperately whether they could have misunderstood Robin somehow. Maybe she’s all the way on the other side of town, fighting monsters alone and beginning to suspect that help will never arrive in time. He pounds on the door again and again, more aggressively than is probably warranted, but no one tries to stop him. They’re all just standing behind him, watching with wide, anxious eyes. ****

Then, just as Mike steps forward and makes to throw his body against the door, Steve sees movement in the store’s dark interior. A moment later Robin comes into view. For the second time in less than fifteen minutes, Steve is overcome with such a strong feeling of relief that it makes him dizzy. She’s there, and she’s _alive,_ and she somehow seems entirely unhurt, and for a moment Steve forgets that they’re still in the middle of some unknown crisis. The second Robin has unlocked and opened the door, he pulls her tightly into his arms.

“What—”

“Thank god you’re okay,” he mumbles into her hair. “Jesus Christ. Thank god.” He can barely speak around the sudden lump in his throat.

She wraps her arms around him, squeezing him back tightly. “I’m fine, dingus,” she says, her voice muffled against his shirt. Then she pulls away. “Get inside.” Her voice is urgent suddenly, and Steve notices for the first time how frazzled she looks, how unlike her usual, composed self. “Before anyone sees.” She grabs Steve’s arm and pulls him into the store after her, locking the door behind them once the others have followed. The lights are all off, and though it really isn’t all that dark with the daylight streaming in through the windows, it takes Steve’s eyes a moment to adjust to the abrupt change.

They all stand in silence for a moment that seems to stretch on forever.

“So…what’s going on?” asks Jonathan finally.

“Don’t take this wrong way,” Nancy adds, “but I don’t see any monsters.”

Robin gives Steve a look, half-annoyed and half-amused, and he understands it to mean something along the lines of _you really love these assholes?_ He just give her a minute shrug in return, trying to keep his expression neutral even as he remembers abruptly that Robin doesn’t know yet about the not-date and subsequent breakdown that, somehow, was just last night. Not for the first time, or even the hundredth, he wishes he could communicate with her telepathically. Then he remembers—and, Jesus Christ, how does he keep _forgetting?_ —that they are, supposedly, all in some sort of danger.

“Uh, no monsters,” says Robin. “At least…not yet? It’s, uh…”

She looks past Steve, her brows furrowed, and he turns to see that she’s looking at Mrs. Byers. Then she shifts her gaze to El, who’s standing just next to Mrs. Byers, her hand clasped firmly in Mike’s. And then, inexplicably, a tiny smile flickers across her face, so brief and so out of place amid all her anxiety that Steve wonders if he’s imagined it.

“Back room,” she says. “They’re, uh—well, follow me.”

“They?”

“Who’s _they?_ ”

“Murray and—is someone else here?”

“I swear to _god_ , if you dragged my little sister into this again—”

“Erica isn’t here,” says Robin hurriedly. “Just—” She beckons them behind the counter and pauses at the door marked _employees only._ “Um, try not to freak out, okay?”

“What the fuck, Robs, did you kill someone?” It’s the only explanation Steve can think of—either that or it was Murray killed somebody and Robin got roped into it somehow, coerced into hiding the body in the back room of her workplace.

She shakes her head and then, with a deep breath, opens the door.

The first person Steve sees is Murray. He’s slouched on the stool that Steve usually occupies when he’s rewinding returned tapes. He looks almost bored, which Steve finds irrationally irritating. “ _Finally,_ ” he says in that self-important drawl that Steve had hoped to never hear again after Starcourt. “Let’s get on with it.”

 _Get on with what?_ Steve wants to ask, but then movement behind Murray catches his eye.

Steve still has that little slip of paper with the barely-legible phone number. He kept it on the fridge at first and then, after the first time his parents came home and his mom asked about it and he didn’t know what to say, in the drawer of his nightstand. _Call if you need anything._ He still looks at it sometimes, though he’s had the number memorized almost since the day he got it—more than a year ago, now. Once, on a particularly bad night not too long ago, he’d almost finally called. But of course by then he’d been months too late for the number to be of any use. No one lived in the cabin anymore to answer the phone.

And yet. ****

He’s thinner than Steve’s ever seen him—gaunt, almost. The beard is back and then some, long and matted and wild-looking, and he’s wearing a hideous trench coat that could only belong to Murray. He looks so different that, for a long few seconds, Steve thinks he must be mistaken. Surely it isn’t him. Surely it’s not—but he knows that face, though the expression on it as he slowly stands up is unlike anything Steve’s ever seen.

From behind him, he hears El’s tiny voice, so quiet it’s barely a whisper.

“Hop?"

Hopper’s face crumples into something like a smile, and Steve can see the tears threatening to spill over. He opens his mouth, but has to try several times before he manages to force any sound out. “Hey, kid.”

She looks around, at Mike and Mrs. Byers and everyone, as if to confirm that they see him too. Judging by how shocked they all look, and by how Mrs. Byers is suddenly clutching Jonathan’s hand as if it’s the only thing keeping her upright, they do. El looks back to Hopper. “Real?” she whispers.

He takes his first step towards her. The tears have begun to stream down his face. “Yeah, honey.” He tries again for a smile but it falters, and Steve can tell it’s taking everything in him not to break down entirely. “I’m real. I’m alive.”

El takes a step forward, too. Her next word is spoken so softly that Steve can only read her lips. “How?”

Hopper just shakes his head slightly and makes a sound that might be a laugh. Then, as if it’s all too much to bear standing up, he sinks to his knees. He holds out his arms.

And then El is running towards him, colliding into his chest and throwing her arms around his neck and burying her face against his shoulder. He wraps one arm around her back and presses the other hand to the back of her head. He’s crying into her hair and she’s crying, too, weeping against him with such force that Steve would think her heart was breaking if he didn’t know the opposite to be true.

He feels a hand slide into his and he squeezes it tightly. Robin squeezes back and looks up at him with a watery smile. Her face is a little blurry and it’s only then that Steve realizes he has tears in his eyes too, even as his heart feels like it might burst with relieved happiness. There’s shock, too, and confusion—Hopper died, he’s supposed to be _dead_ —but none of Steve’s questions feel terribly urgent right now. All that matters is that Hopper is here somehow, holding his daughter after so many days apart.

They all watch Hopper and El for a minute that feels like it might last hours. Then Nancy speaks. “You’re dead,” she says, and Steve is pretty sure that no one outside of this room would have been able to detect the slight tremor in her voice.

Hopper looks at her over the top of El’s head. “No,” he says gruffly, his voice still choked.

“But—” Nancy looks to Jonathan, who has an arm around his mom’s shoulders now, and the two of them seem to communicate silently with each other. Her eyes flick to Mrs. Byers, and then back to Hopper. “I thought—”

He shakes his head, looking up at Mrs. Byers now. Something in his eyes changes when he sees her—softens, maybe. He takes a deep breath. “No,” he says again, more to Mrs. Byers than to Nancy. “No, you…I…”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” says Murray impatiently. “Don’t you imbeciles get it? He obviously—”

“Fuck off, Murray.”

Steve is startled to hear those words coming from Mrs. Byers. Her voice is shaking so badly it’s almost unrecognizable, but it’s still there, that familiar edge of steel. She drops Jonathan’s hand and steps forward.

“You stood me up,” she says quietly.

Hopper barks out a startled, shaky laugh. “I guess we’re even, then.”

And Steve doesn’t know what that means, doesn’t have any idea what they’re referring too, but it makes Mrs. Byers laugh a little too. And then she runs to Hopper, wrapping her arms around both him and El, and he holds her back tightly, as if he never plans to let go.

—

“Are we done yet?” demands Murray.

El looks up from Hopper’s shoulder. He’s standing now, one arm wrapped around her and the other around Will. The rest of the kids are hovering nearby, none of them close enough with Hopper to join the hug but all with shocked, tearful joy evident in their faces. “No,” says El simply, then buries her face against her dad again.

Steve can’t help his huff of laughter at Murray’s look of indignation at being so easily dismissed. Hopper looks up at the noise and meets Steve’s gaze. The sudden eye contact is startling. He usually only sees the chief when the world is ending, and even when it’s not he always looks kind of pissed off; it’s strange to see him now like this, his eyes still red with tears of joy.

“It’s good to see you, Chief,” says Steve quietly. It feels like an almost comical understatement, but what the fuck else is he supposed to say to someone who’s just come back from the dead?

Hopper smiles slightly at him, just the corners of his mouth turning up. He looks soft and fond still, and even though Steve knows that it isn’t directed at him, that it’s just residual happiness from having El in his arms, he can’t help the slight lump that forms in his throat. He could ring that number now, Steve realizes. Someone would be there to answer.

“Thanks, kid,” says Hopper. “It’s good to see you, too.”

Steve smiles back, then looks away before he does something stupid like cry. He finds himself looking at Jonathan instead. Jonathan is looking back at him, grinning. He has tears on his face, his eyes red and puffy, but he’s grinning.

Steve can’t remember the last time he saw a look of such uncomplicated happiness in Jonathan’s face, and it makes him feel as if his chest is full of helium. Jonathan should look like that all the time. Jonathan _deserves_ to look like that all the time. Steve would do anything to keep that smile in place, though right now, it seems, his efforts aren’t needed.

He’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop, though. Robin had said there were no monsters _yet,_ not that there wouldn’t be any at all, and while Hopper’s apparent resurrection was certainly reason enough on its own to rush back to Hawkins, it doesn’t quite explain how afraid she’d seemed. But even if there is still some impending crisis, it feels like it might be a little more manageable now that it’s not their first crisis without Hopper.

Anyway, all the kids are much smarter now than he’ll ever be. If none of them seem worried, even Mike, then Steve is willing to accept that a Demo-dog probably isn’t about to come crashing through the window.

But his confidence fades when he notices Nancy’s face. She’s leaning into Jonathan’s side, his arm around her shoulders, but she doesn’t seem to share any of his happiness. Instead she’s biting her lip as she gazes at Hopper, her brow furrowed. It’s the expression Steve knows as her thinking face—the one she always made when she encountered a particularly difficult calculus problem when they studied together. It’s been a long time since he’s seen Nancy do calculus homework, though. More recently, he’s seen that face—

His heart sinks so rapidly that it makes him feel a little nauseas.

It’s the face she makes when she’s trying to figure out how to avert the end of the world.

Steve’s about to ask her what’s going on when she says tersely to Murray, “Explain.”

“I’m _trying_ to,” he says, rolling his eyes. “But this schmooze-fest—”

Nancy crosses her arms and glares at him.

“Hold your goddamn horses. You—Miss Wheeler—Byers—“ he points at Nancy and Jonathan, speaking loudly enough now that he’s drawn everyone’s attention. “You really haven’t figured it out? I thought you were into all that investigative journalism shit.”

Annoyance flashes in Nancy’s face. “Cut the crap, Murray,” she says. “Just explain.”

Murray scowls at her, but at least has the good sense to look somewhat chastised. Steve can’t help but continue to look at Nancy instead of Murray, even as he starts to speak. Her expression is a little angry, but it’s more than that. She looks hard, determined, urgent, the same way she did when she tried to shut the door in Steve’s face that very first time at Jonathan’s house—God, more than two years ago, now. In spite of everything, Steve has to bite back a sudden, insane laugh. He’s never thought of himself as having already been in love with Jonathan then. He hadn’t thought he was even properly in love with Nancy yet, though he’d known already that he would get there. And yet he’d hardly hesitated before running back into that house with the monster when he could just as easily have left.

He’s never _not_ been willing to die for both of them. He isn’t sure if that thought is comforting or terrifying.

“…jumped through the gate,” Murray is saying. Steve shakes his head, forcing himself to pay attention. “There was just a second between when Joyce turned the key and when the machine exploded. That’s why there was no body.”

“I thought there was nobody because he was incinerated,” says Dustin. Normally Steve would whack him in the back of the head for saying something like that in front of El—or at all, really, depending on his mood—but he isn’t sure what’s appropriate anymore, now that Hopper’s apparently not dead. When he glances at El, she seems unfazed by it. With a slight sinking of his heart, he supposes she’s already spent the past few months imagining her dad’s death over and over again. None of them could possibly say anything on the subject she hasn’t already thought of.

Max frowns. “So…where were you then?” she asks, looking at Hopper.

Hopper opens his mouth, but the answer comes from someone else, so quietly that Steve can barely hear it.

“You were in the Upside Down,” says Will softly. He doesn’t look or sound confused. Really, Steve thinks, he seems almost calm. He doesn’t say it like a question. It’s a realization, one that Will already knows is correct.

And Steve remembers, then, that Will too came back from the dead. Not nearly so long a death—not even close—but he too had had a funeral, a body even, a large collection of unsuspicious mourners. But Will wasn’t ever really dead. All that time, he’d been in—

“The Upside Down,” echoes Mike.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” says Nancy quietly.

Dustin frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Well, we all thought Mrs. Byers closed the gate, right? But if Hopper went into the Upside Down and then _came back out…”_

“That means there’s another gate,” Mike realizes.

There’s a long, tense silence after her words. Then Jonathan says quietly, “So it isn’t over.”

He doesn’t sound afraid. He just sounds exhausted. And really, thinks Steve, looking over at him, that’s almost sadder. Jonathan is one of the kindest, gentlest, softest people Steve’s ever known. No person like that should be so accustomed to this shit that it’s become more tiring than frightening.

“No,” says Hopper. His voice is low and gravelly and he tightens his arm around El’s shoulders as he speaks. “It isn’t over.”

“Are we safe?” asks Mrs. Byers.

Steve turns to look at her, incredulous, and he sees the others do the same. _Safe?_ She should know better than any of them what it means to have another gate open.

“I mean—not long term, but—are we safe right now? Are we being…actively pursued?”

The question is directed at Murray, who sighs long and loud before answering. “Maybe,” he says, and Steve doesn’t blame Mrs. Byers for opening her mouth in protest because really, what kind of answer is that? But Murray hurries to continue before she can interrupt. “Look, they’ll have noticed by now that Jim’s not in his cell anymore, so they’ll probably be pursuing us. But I’m pretty sure they’ll think he’s still in Russia, so that buys us some time.”

“Wait, who’s _they?_ ” asks Max, at the same time as Lucas says, “ _Russia_?”

“Holy shit,” says Dustin, sounding impressed. “You broke the chief out of Russian prison?”

Murray’s tone when he answers makes it clear that he finds his own feat as impressive as Dustin does. “To make a _very_ long story _very_ short, the portal—gate—whatever—is linking Russia and Hawkins. That’s how they got in this summer without anyone noticing. Jim went in, came out in Russia, got captured. I infiltrated the prison, got him back through the gate, we came out back here. But we did our best to make it look like we’d escaped out the front door, so to speak, so they should be searching Kamchatka before they come anywhere near here.”

“Where’s the gate this time?” asks Mike.

“Not far,” Hopper answers. “Close to where the mall was.”

There’s a long silence before Nancy speaks. “So there’s another gate opened in Hawkins and as soon as they realize you’re not in Russia we’re going to be hunted down by evil Russians,” she summarizes in a voice that Steve thinks impressively calm given the circumstances. “And we’re in a Family Video…why?”

“I guess you used to use the Byers’ house as some sort of home base?” says Robin. “But that’s obviously not an option anymore, so. This was the only place I could think of that we’d have any…I don’t know, privacy, secrecy, whatever.”

Steve still has a lot of questions, and he’s pretty sure that everyone else does too. They probably have even more questions than he does, actually, because Nancy and Jonathan and Robin and all the kids are smarter than he’ll ever be and they’ve probably done a better job of parsing through Murray’s explanation and noticing all the things that don’t quite make sense. But no one asks. Nancy just says somewhat resignedly, “I guess this as good a place as any.”

 _For another monster apocalypse._ She doesn’t add that part, but Steve knows she’s thinking it. They all must be.

“So what happens now?” asks Lucas. “I mean, we can’t stay in this video store forever.”

“We need to get in touch with Owens,” says Hopper. “So he can come up with some sort of cover story for me not being dead. And so his guys can deal with this new gate, because—”

“—there’s no way in hell our kids are getting anywhere near that thing again,” finishes Joyce.

Hopper nods solemnly. “No way in hell.”

“So until then—” starts Nancy, but she’s cut off by a crashing noise from outside. It sounds distant, but that’s cold comfort.

Steve freezes and locks eyes with Jonathan, who, after a tense silence says slowly, “What was that?” His voice is flat, like he already knows the answer.

“The Russians?”

“No way they got here so fast.”

“But—”

Then the lights start flickering.

In the flashing light they hold their breath. Then—“Demogorgon,” says El.

“It shouldn’t be able to find us here,” says Mike nervously, and it’s clear he’s trying to convince himself as much as the rest of them. “It can’t spy through Will anymore. And it can’t be connected to El at all anymore, since her powers are gone—”

“Wait.” Hopper looks down at her. “They never came back?”

She shakes her head miserably, but if she was going to speak, it’s cut off by a loud popping sound, followed by an electric whine as the lights go dark.

“Oh shit,” mutters Dustin. “Oh _shit._ ”

Steve looks across at Nancy and Jonathan, who are pressed close together. Their expressions are so familiar to him it makes his heart ache—Nancy’s hard eyes, Jonathan’s set jaw. They’re holding hands, but they both look up at Steve as if they can sense him watching them. Nancy doesn’t smile, but gives him the tiniest nod.

 _We’ll get through this,_ it seems to say.

Steve takes a deep breath. He fumbles in the dark for Robin’s hand, then finds Dustin’s head to ruffle his hair through his hat. He gives her a tiny nod in return.

—

Steve can’t help but feel a little embarrassed by how poorly prepared he is compared with everyone else. He’d been terrified something might happen to Robin while he was away, but it hadn’t occurred to him to bring a weapon with to the Byers’ house. He isn’t at all surprised when Murray pulls out two enormous guns and hands one to Hopper—he can hardly think of a single time he’s seen Hopper _without_ a gun—but it’s the kids that startle him.

Lucas reaches into his backpack and takes out his wrist rocket, somehow still intact after so many years of monster fighting. Steve doesn’t have the heart to point out that Lucas has never actually successfully taken out a Demogorgon with it; he’s too busy trying to force down the wave of sadness he feels at the realization that this _literal child_ doesn’t feel safe enough to travel without a weapon.

Max pulls a switchblade from the pocket of her sweatshirt and flicks it out casually, eliciting a gasp from Mrs. Byers. “Max—”

“It was Billy’s,” she says. Her voice doesn’t shake, but Steve can see something flicker in her eyes. He doesn’t have to ask whether Billy gave it to her; he knows he didn’t. The thought of Max going through her step-brother’s things, finding a weapon and pocketing it with the grim thought that maybe she’d be able to save herself where Billy couldn’t, makes him want to pull her into his arms and never let go.

Nancy pulls out a gun.

“ _Jesus,_ Nance.” Jonathan takes a step away from her, even after everything still uncomfortable around guns in a way that Steve can’t help but find almost endearing. “You brought a gun to my _house_ for _Thanksgiving?_ ”

“Yes,” she says in a tone that leaves no room for argument, “I bring it everywhere.”

“You aren’t even eighteen,” says Mrs. Byers quietly. She doesn’t sound disapproving. Just sad, mostly.

And Steve realizes suddenly why his hands feel so empty—“I left my bat at home,” he says. All eleven of them turn to stare at him and he feels himself flush. “Uh. You know. The one with the spikes.”

“Technically it’s Nancy’s bat,” says Jonathan. Steve looks at him, startled. He can’t quite read his expression.

“Well.” Nancy clears her throat, shifts her weight from foot to foot. “Jonathan’s the one who put nails in it.” ****

“And now it’s Steve’s weapon of choice.” Robin’s expression is easier to interpret, if only because he knows her so well—it’s just a shadow of a smirk, there only for the briefest moment for her face turns serious again. Under better circumstances, he’d be giving her a good shove.

“I’m sorry,” says Murray, “ _how_ is this important right now?”

“It’s not,” Steve says hurriedly. “I just, uh. I usually have the bat when we…fight Demogorgons.” He still feels silly calling them that, but now that they’re on their fourth monster apocalypse he suppose it’s a little late to propose a name change.

“Here.” Hopper pulls another pistol out of his coat and tosses it to Steve, who, too startled to protest, catches it. “You can use this, right?”

“Uh—yeah, I guess.” He isn’t especially confident in his ability to use it to take out a Demogorgon but he does, at least, know the basics. He’s less certain how Hopper managed to get ahold of an extra gun when he’s apparently come pretty much straight from Russian prison by way of an inter-dimensional hell gate, but decides against asking.

It feels a lot like last year in the Byers’ house—all of them standing at attention with various weapons, tense and waiting for _something_ but not quite certain what. Except now Hopper’s arms are already shaking from a few seconds of holding his gun up, and El doesn’t have her powers, and there’s even more people to protect, and whatever shit’s headed their way might be backed up by Russian soldiers. Also, Steve _loves_ these people now. If anything were to happen to Robin or one of the kids, he isn’t sure how he’d survive it. And if anything were to happen to Nancy or Jonathan…

He swallows hard against the panic that’s rising in his throat like vomit. He glances over at them to reassure himself that, for now at least, they’re still okay.

And this, too, is just like last year. Nancy and Jonathan pressed together while he watches from a slight distance; they way they move so easily together, perfectly in-sync, making him glaringly aware of how much he’d be intruding. Even then, before Steve and Nancy had really broken up before Jonathan and Nancy had really gotten together, there’d been such a rightness about them that no one questioned it. They were a unit, a team. They still are.

And Steve still isn’t part of it.

Maybe he’s read this whole thing wrong, he thinks. Maybe—he’d thought, that morning when Nancy asked if he loved them, that she looked almost hopeful. But with the distance of a few hours, he’s less certain that’s what it was. He was never good with Nancy’s emotions; wasn’t that why she dumped him in the first place? Maybe the look on her face had been pity. Maybe the look on Jonathan’s had been disdain.

He wants to go to them. He wants it desperately. This might be the end of the world. Any one of them might die tonight, or all three. He can’t let that happen without knowing. Even if it’s not the answer he wants. He needs to know.

But when Hopper says gruffly that they should work on barricading the back room they’re trapped in, Jonathan immediately takes Nancy’s hand. Neither of them even look in Steve’s direction.

And he knows then that he can’t do this to them, not now, not when the world might be ending. Why would they want to spend what could very well be the last few minutes of their lives trying to let Steve down kindly?

And why would _he_ want that? They’re not the only ones here that he loves. He looks over at Robin to find that she’s already watching him, terror in her eyes that he’s pretty sure only he knows her well enough to notice. He looks at Dustin, all but pressed into Lucas’s side, trying and failing to put on a brave face. And Lucas with his other arm around Max’s shoulders, and Mike with his arm around Will’s, and El holding Hopper’s hand—

“Steve.”

He’s startled to turn and see Nancy, suddenly standing right next to him. His heart leaps into his throat to see her so close—close enough he could count every freckle if he didn’t already have every pattern of her skin memorized.

“Help Jon and I with the shelves?”

It takes him a moment to figure out what she’s referring to—the huge, ugly cabinet where they keep all the tapes that still need to be rewound. Jonathan’s already pushing it—towards the window, Steve realizes. He’d forgotten the window was even there—the blinds are always drawn when he’s at work, as if Keith doesn’t want anyone peeking in from outside to see all the behind-the-scenes magic of video rewinding—but now a shiver goes through him at how gapingly huge it seems, and how fragile. It wouldn’t take a Demogorgon to smash through that window. It would barely take a child.

“Yeah, of course.”

He joins Jonathan in pushing it, Nancy on the other side to guide it, and after a few minutes they’ve managed to drag it across the room so that it blocks the window. He leans back against it, trying to catch his breath. Panting, Jonathan leans beside him.

They’re quiet for a moment, watching the others assemble some sort of blockade in front of the door. Steve’s about to go join them when Nancy says abruptly, “I know this isn’t the right time.”

He snaps his gaze back to her, but she’s looking down at the floor. Then she exchanges a glance with Jonathan, and Steve’s heart aches at how easily he can read the silent words that pass between them: _Should I say it? Yes. Are you sure? Yes, I’m ready._

“Right time for what, Nance?” he asks when it becomes clear that she’s still hesitant to continue.

She takes a deep breath, and then finally meets his eyes with a look of determination. “We should talk. About this morning.”

Steve feels his heart stop. It’s as if _everything_ has stopped, actually—he doesn’t register the others, can’t hear them piling up furniture and video equipment, can barely even recall the fear and anticipation he knows he should be feeling. It’s as if the whole world has shrunk to Nancy’s sharp eyes on his, and the warmth of Jonathan standing beside him.

But he already promised himself he wouldn’t do this. Nancy is right; it’s _not_ the time. So even though every part of his heart is screaming at him to agree with her, he forces himself to say in a carefully neutral voice, “There’s nothing to talk about.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jonathan’s head turn to look at him. “Isn’t there?” he prods.

Steve shakes his head. “Look,” he says, and hopes his voice is steady. “I was…a mess, last night. I was in a rough place. And I really appreciated you guys helping me out. So whatever I might have said this morning, I didn’t…”

 _I didn’t mean it,_ he tries to say. But he can’t force the words out.

It’s clear Nancy knows what he’s thinking, though. “So you were lying,” she says, her voice flat.

“No! No, no, I wasn’t _lying,_ I just—”

“Wasn’t telling the truth?” Jonathan guesses without humor.

“I don’t…”

“Steve,” says Nancy. “We could all be about to die, okay? So just, just don’t try to lie to us, or be evasive, or whatever it is you’re doing. Just tell us what you’re thinking. _Please._ ”

And for some reason, those words just make him angry. _Tell us what you’re thinking._ That’s what they’re asking of him, constantly. Nancy in the car, asking if he wished things were different; last night, asking if he loved them; now demanding, again, that he be honest with them when they have never returned the favor. “How about _you_ tell me what _you’re_ thinking, for once?”

Nancy looks stunned for a moment. Then she bites her lip. “Steve, I…”

But even though he’s just _asked_ her to tell him, he finds suddenly that he can’t bear to hear it. It was laughable, acting like he was avoiding the conversation because he didn’t want to cause _them_ any pain right now. If he’s being honest with himself, it’s himself he’s trying to protect. Because if he’s about to die, he doesn’t want to die knowing that Nancy and Jonathan don’t love him. If nothing else, he wants to die still believing that they might.

He can’t bear to hear her say it, but he knows what it is she must be thinking. They’re all the reasons he’s told himself over the past few months that they could never love him; all the reasons he’s told himself over the past few years that _no one_ could love him. And without thinking, without planning it, he finds himself reciting the list. “I’m a total fuckup,” he says. “I was useless in school and I didn’t get into a single college and even my own fucking dad didn’t think I was good enough to come work for him so now I work in a fucking Family Video and I’ll probably be here forever, and most of my friends are literal _children_ , and God, I just don’t get why you _care_ so much, Nancy! Either of you! And I don’t understand what you want from me—”

“Steve, no,” says Nancy, her brows furrowing. “No, we care about you, we—we _love—_ ”

“I’m a shitty person!” Steve shouts. That word, _love,_ is ringing in his mind, but he won’t let her finish, won’t let her say it. Not just to hear her take it back again, like she did last night. “And an even shittier boyfriend, God, Nance, we couldn’t even make it a _year_ before it all went to shit—we were fucking terrible for each other, you know that—”

“You’ve grown up, Steve,” she says. She sounds angry now more than soothing. “We both have.”

“I’ve done so many shitty things—”

“Yeah, you have,” Jonathan cuts in sharply, and even though Steve’s saying it about himself, even though he’s trying to _convince_ them of how terrible he is, it’s unexpectedly painful to hear him agree.

“Jonathan—”

“No, Nancy, he needs to fucking hear this. You were an _asshole,_ Steve. You were always pushing me around, called me a queer, insulted my family, said that—” he takes a deep, shuddering breath— “said it was my mom and I’s fault when Will went missing, fucking beat me up, broke my camera when you _knew_ I’d never be able to afford another one—”

And then, at his words, something in Steve hurtles straight past the hurt and into a deep, furious, blinding anger. “Oh, you wanna talk about the camera? Let’s talk about _why_ I broke the camera then, huh, Byers? Because I don’t seem to remember you asking _permission_ before you took those fucking photos of Nancy through my window, you perverted creep—”

“I _apologized—_ ”

“And I’m pretty sure you were the one who threw the first punch that day, or are you too busy playing the fucking victim all the time to remember that? And then you didn’t even have the decency to wait until Nance and I had broken up before you went and screwed her—”

“What, and Nancy didn’t play any part in that? What do you think, I decided to carry off your little damsel and she just went along with it? That’s always been your problem, Steve, you never thought of her like a real person, _never_ —“

“Oh, yeah, cause _you’ve_ always been so fucking respectful with your hero-worship and the fucking pictures—” ****

“Stop it!” yells Nancy. “Just _stop_ it, both of you, this is ridiculous—”

Jonathan ignores her. He’s turned to face him, standing so close to Steve now that their faces are only inches apart. “And who was it who graffitied all over town calling her a slut just because you got your feelings hurt? And why are you still so hung up on the fucking pictures? It was two years ago and I apologized and Nancy forgave me because we’re _fucking adults,_ and she—”

“Who do you think bought you the _fucking_ camera?”

Jonathan goes still. There’s a long beat of silence. “Nancy did,” he says finally.

Steve scoffs. He’s trying so hard. He’s _been_ trying, for two years, and Jonathan won’t even fucking admit it to himself. They’re practically touching now, Steve realizes. Their faces are all but pressed together. And Jonathan’s mouth is right there, his lips warm and full and slightly chapped, and Steve can’t help but glance down at it. He’s so close. He’s too close.

Then Jonathan frowns and takes a step back, looking confused and uncertain. “Didn’t she?” He looks at Nancy. “Didn’t you?”

Nancy shakes her head. There are tears in her eyes—because of them, Steve realizes. Because of him. He feels a pang of guilt. “Steve bought the camera, Jonathan,” she says quietly.

Jonathan turns back to Steve, still looking completely uncomprehending. “But…why?”

Steve closes his eyes and laughs desperately and cannot stop the words that come out next. “Because I _love_ you, you asshole.”

Jonathan opens his mouth, draws in a sharp breath.

Then—“Oh,” he says softly.

Steve takes a step closer to him, and reaches out for Nancy, and then he’s touching both of them, all three of them linked, each holding onto some part of the other two, and he isn’t sure if it’s quite a hug or if he’s about to kiss one of them or if—

There’s a colossal thud, and they spring apart.

The kids—and he fucking _forgot_ about them, Steve realizes with a flash of embarrassment, and this room is much too small and they were much too loud for them not to have heard every word—jump back from the barricaded door. Hopper and Murray both raise their guns, and Joyce reaches for Will, and Lucas positions his slingshot, and Max holds out her knife.

“Holy shit,” says Dustin. “ _Holy shit._ ”

The door is shaking. There’s a series of crashes—something is throwing itself against it, Steve realizes with a sickening lurch of his heart.

There’s something out there, trying to get in.

Belatedly, he remembers the gun Hopper gave him and grabs it from the table where he set it down. He switches off the safety with shaking fingers and, out of the corner of his eye, sees Nancy do the same with hers. The door shakes again, and this time the entire wall gives an alarming groan. But it doesn’t open.

And then the table pushed up against the door starts to slide, so slowly that at first Steve thinks he’s imagining it. Then, when he realizes that the table is definitely moving and there’s definitely no one touching it, he looks to El—her powers are back, he thinks with a surge of relief. But El isn’t doing anything. Her hands hang at her sides and she’s watching the table move with as much wide-eyed horror as the rest of them.

Then the chair wedged under the doorknob slips and clatters to the floor.

 _“Fuck,”_ someone hisses.

The bolt on the door slides open, though nobody’s turned the lock. The doorknob begins to rotate.

There’s a moment just before the door swings open when Robin slides her hand into his. He holds on tightly.

Then, with a crash, it bursts inward.

The lights begin flickering madly. Steve’s pretty sure he yells something, but even he isn’t certain what—it’s lost amid everyone else’s screams and the sound of Hopper’s gun as he immediately begins to shoot. The creature—whatever it is—roars and advances towards them, not seeming to notice the bullets that hit it.

“ _Get back!”_ Hopper is shouting, and Steve doesn’t know whether he’s telling the monster to leave or everyone else to get behind him. If the former, the monster doesn’t listen; it’s advancing on Hopper steadily. It’s not a Demogorgon, Steve doesn’t think—at least, if it is, it’s bigger than he remembers the one at Jonathan’s house being. It has to be twice Hopper’s size, and it keeps moving forward, and Steve can’t see Hopper’s eyes but El’s are wide and terrified as she holds out her hands in a futile attempt to use her powers to stop it.

 _El is going to lose her dad again,_ Steve thinks wildly, and then realizes that that won’t matter if El and everyone else and himself, too, are also about to die.

Then another bullet hits the side of its head, and Steve turns to see Nancy walking toward it, holding the gun out with hands that don’t even shake. But her voice is less steady when she yells, “Go away, you _bastard!_ ”

It turns its head. The moment that follows seems, to Steve, to play in slow motion. Nancy looks right at it, and if it had eyes it would be staring back. If anyone is still screaming, Steve cannot hear them. He is aware only of Nancy’s face, her jaw set and her eyes hard and angry, glaring in the blinking light. The gun is still held out in front of her. Then the monster roars again.

Steve can’t move. He cannot breathe.

 _“Nancy!”_ he screams, and he’s dimly aware of Jonathan shouting the same thing.

It occurs to him, as the monster lunges toward her, that he was wrong earlier. He couldn’t have been in love with them already two years ago. He’d been willing to die for them, sure, but that had been different—an instinct to protect that, he thinks now, would probably have applied no matter who had been in the house.

But he’s in love with them now. God, he’s in love with them, and the difference is that where last time he’d still been capable of action, now he’s so frozen with fear that he can’t make himself move. _Shock,_ his brain supplies helpfully. This must be what it’s like to be in shock.

Nancy is going to die. Nancy is going to die and he’s only just admitted his feelings, hasn’t even heard either of them say it back. Nancy is going to die and he’ll have to watch as she’s torn to pieces, as her eyes lose that radiant light that’s made him fall for her again and again, and he’s never going to hear her call him an idiot again, and he’ll never get to say _You are beautiful, Nancy Wheeler,_ even though it’s true, even though she’s the most beautiful person he’s ever seen, and the light in Jonathan’s eyes will die too when she goes. Nancy is going to die and it’s going to be his fault, all his fault, because he _can’t fucking move._

Then, in a movement too fast for him to really process, Robin leaves his side and runs to Nancy. _“Move!”_ she’s screaming. “ _Move, move, move!”_ And she reaches Nancy, shoves her out of the way, and they’re both tumbling over, and the monster, with a snarl, snaps its hideous mouth and misses, closing its teeth around air. It turns, still snarling, back to where Nancy and Robin are now lying in a tangled pile on the floor.

All at once, Steve feels himself unfreeze, and Jonathan must experience the same thing because both of them are running at it, ready to shoot it—tackle it—anything—

But before they get there, there’s a terrible scream from behind them and the monster flies suddenly against the wall, where it hits with a nauseating squelch. Steve turns just in time to see El walking slowly toward them. Her arms are still outstretched, but this time there’s blood leaking from both her nostrils. The veins in her face stand out dark against her ghostly skin.

 _“El!”_ Hopper yells, struggling to get up—Murray and Lucas and Dustin are all on the ground too, Steve realizes. They must have been standing too near El, blown back by the force of her powers’ sudden return.

She’s got it pinned against the wall, where it squirms and squeals. “I have to protect my friends,” she says quietly, still stepping forward.

“El, _stop!_ ” screams Mike.

Steve remembers suddenly, then, what Dustin told him about that day in the school, when they thought El had died. She’d had the monster pinned like this. She’d been walking toward it just like this. And when she killed it, she was sucked into the Upside Down.

But before he can join Mike and the other kids in screaming for her to stop, El is pushed aside, roughly, by Mrs. Byers. She’s holding the gun that Hopper dropped when he fell to the floor. She points it at the monster. “You are done hurting my children,” she says in a voice of deadly calm, and then she shoots.

Steve doesn’t know what does it—maybe it was already weakened by El’s attack, or maybe Mrs. Byers has hit just the right spot—but it crumples to the ground, lifeless.

There’s a breathless moment of silence.

Then a moan, and he turns to see Nancy and Robin still crumpled on the floor. Nancy is struggling to get upright.

Robin isn’t moving.

Steve’s brief relief is gone as quickly as it came. “Robin!” he shouts, running to her and falling to his knees beside her. Her leg is bleeding, he realizes, a steady ooze from the gash that runs down her shin. Her face is deadly pale. “ _Robin!”_

She’s still breathing in shallow, pained-sounding gasps, but her eyes are shut and she isn’t responding. When he tries to lift her by her shoulders, her head falls back limply.

“Don’t move her,” says someone sharply, and then Hopper is taking Robin from Steve’s arms, pushing him away. He studies the wound. “I need a first aid kit,” he commands, then after a moment’s pause, “ _Steve.”_

“What?”

“First aid kit. You know where it is?”

His brain, frozen and numb, takes a few seconds to register the question, and another few to remember that he works here and knows the answer. “Yeah,” he chokes out, then runs to get it from the bottom of the cabinet that he, Nancy, and Jonathan pushed against the window.

“It got her,” Nancy tearfully is saying tearfully when he returns. All her inflexible strength is gone now that the monster is dead. “I—its claw, I think, I—”

“It’s not your fault, honey,” says Mrs. Byers, crouching done on Robin’s other side to help Hopper pull away the fabric of her jeans. “Robin. Robin, can you hear me?”

If she can, she gives no response. His entire body trembling, Steve hands over the first aid kit. Hopper immediately passes it to Lucas, who’s standing nearest. “Bandages and antiseptic,” he instructs. It takes Steve a moment to realize why Hopper isn’t getting them out himself, and then a chill runs through his body. Hopper can’t dig through the first aid kit because his hands are coated in blood. Robin’s blood.

He chokes back a sob.

If only—God, if only he wasn’t so stupidly caught up in Nancy and Jonathan, he would have been beside her, helping her barricade the door. Maybe, with that extra effort, they could have stopped the monster getting in. Maybe if he wasn’t so _useless_ he could have been the one to knock Nancy out of the way, to save her, and then Robin wouldn’t be—she wouldn’t be—

There’s a hand in his, squeezing tightly. He looks down to see Jonathan’s fingers tangled with his own. “She’ll be okay,” he whispers. His eyes are filled with tears that, under any other circumstances, Steve would have an overwhelming urge to kiss away. Now he can just stare blankly at him, barely comprehending the words. “She’s strong.”

 _You don’t even_ know _her,_ Steve wants to snap back, but he doesn’t because Jonathan is right. Robin is strong. She’s the strongest person Steve knows. But even Robin has a limit to how much she can bleed.

Then Nancy’s on his other side. She doesn’t say anything, just takes his other hand.

Last time he’d been holding both their hands, he’d been completely overwhelmed. Now he just feels numb, except for the raw terror coursing through him. He feels as if the scene in front of him is playing out in fragments, in pictures—Hopper wiping away the extra blood—Lucas handing over the antiseptic—Mrs. Byers dabbing it on carefully—Hopper tying the bandage—

And then Robin’s eyes flicker open.

Steve’s heart gives an enormous, painful leap, and he tugs away from Nancy and Jonathan, running to Robin’s side. “Robin,” he whispers, not caring that there are tears running down his face and his voice sounds completely wrecked. He runs a hand through her hair. “I thought—”

“‘M not dead yet, dingus,” she mumbles, fighting to keep her eyes open.

He lets out a desperate laugh. “No, you’re not,” he whispers. He keeps his hand buried in her hair, letting his thumb stroke back and forth across her temple. “You scared me.”

She chuckles weakly. “About time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Last summer…when the Russians…you were…unconscious…scared me. Now…my turn.” Her voice becomes more slurred the longer she speaks, and then, by the end of the sentence, her eyes are slipping shut again and her head is lolling to the side.

“Robin,” says Steve, alarmed. “Robin, wake up—”

He feels a heavy hand on his shoulder. “She’s okay, kid,” says Hopper. “She’ll be okay. Let her rest.”

Steve shrugs him off. “But she—”

“She’s still breathing normally, see?” says Hopper, directing Steve’s gaze to the steady rise and fall of her chest. “Look, why don’t you sit with her, okay? Keep her comfortable and let me know if anything changes. But I really think she’s okay.”

Steve takes a deep breath and looks up to meet his gaze. Hopper is looking back at him with such gentleness, such understanding even under all his gruffness, that Steve can’t stop fresh tears from welling up. “Okay,” he says shakily, his voice breaking on the word.

Hopper pats his shoulder again and then stands to go to El, who Steve realizes only then has not yet stood from where Mrs. Byers shoved her aside. She appears unhurt but is clearly exhausted, leaning heavily against Mike while her nose continues to bleed sluggishly. Jonathan’s gone to her side, too, and as Steve watches he says something quietly to her that makes her smile. He feels his heart warm at that. He’s forgotten, really, that Jonathan is basically her brother now, that El is his little sister. He hopes that Hopper being back won’t change that. Jonathan is a good brother. El deserves someone like him, after everything.

Carefully, he pulls Robin’s head into his lap and continues to stroke her hair. After a minute, Dustin comes and sits down beside him. To Steve’s surprise, he leans into his side, resting his head against Steve’s shoulder. Steve puts his arm around him.

“You okay, buddy?” he asks.

“Yeah,” says Dustin. His voice is a little shaky, but Steve knows that even if Dustin’s not okay now, he will be. He’s a tough kid. “Are you?”

Steve laughs humorlessly. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“You don’t look okay.”

He knows that Dustin is right. He can still feel the sticky dampness of tears on his face, which is probably still red and puffy from crying. His hair is definitely a disaster from how many times he’s run his hands through it in agitation today. He’s covered in his best friend’s blood.

But Robin is alive. She’s unconscious, but the bleeding has stopped and she’s resting with her head in Steve’s lap. Dustin is leaning against him, his untamable hair tickling Steve’s neck. And everyone else is okay, too. Murray is standing against a wall, his arms crossed. Max is sitting with her head on Lucas’s shoulder and Lucas is leaning into Mike, who’s got an arm around Will. A few feet away, El is letting Mrs. Byers clean some of the blood from her face while she sits curled against Hopper, who is somehow, miraculously, alive.

And Nancy is standing with Jonathan’s arms wrapped around her from behind, his chin resting on top of her head. Her eyes are closed, and so are Jonathan’s—contented, relieved, grateful to have made it out alive once again. But as Steve watches them they both open their eyes and look right at him. Nancy smiles slightly—that soft, shy smile that’s been driving him crazy for years. The corners of Jonathan’s eyes crinkle slightly, and he nods. _We’re here,_ his face seems to say. _And we aren’t going anywhere._

Steve smiles back at them, and then reaches up to ruffle Dustin’s hair. “I’m okay, buddy,” he says quietly. “I promise.”

—

When the military shows up, bursting into the video store with guns raised as if there’s still something for them to fight, Steve can’t help but laugh.

“About damn time,” says Hopper when they reach the back room, and Steve watches their shocked faces in amusement as they take in the dead Demogorgon. One of them, a man in a suit who Steve vaguely remembers being there after the mall, just gapes at Hopper, his mouth opening and closing furiously as he struggles to form words.

“You’re alive,” he eventually lands on.

“Clearly,” says Hopper dryly. “Good to see you, Doc.”

“I don’t…”

“I think the more pressing question,” says Murray loudly, “is why it takes you incompetent buffoons _so damn long_ to get here every time.”

Mrs. Byers snorts. “I don’t get why the military hasn’t just set up a permanent base in Hawkins yet,” she says. “Then we wouldn’t have to wait so fucking long for backup every goddamn time this happens.”

“ _Mom!”_

Steve doesn’t bother paying attention to any of the explanations and arguments and questions that follow. It doesn’t seem important, somehow, how the military found out about the most recent Hawkins gate or how they tracked the monster to Family Video. All that matters is that they’re here now, and if something else happens, the people he loves won’t be the ones dealing with it.

Eventually they bring in a stretcher, and a team of men lift Robin onto it just as she’s beginning to stir. Steve follows them out without hesitation, and is surprised—ridiculously, he supposes, given the two dozen military men who have just swarmed the building—to find the parking lot filled with tanks and vans and ambulances. He wonders vaguely what the rest of Hawkins must think about the enormous team of emergency vehicles that seems to converge on one particular part of the town every November.

 _Fucking November,_ he thinks hysterically.

—

“No one’s ever gonna hire us again,” Robin mumbles.

He looks down at her. They’re sitting in the back of one of the ambulances together, Robin having been re-bandaged and pronounced concussion-free. She’s resting her head on his shoulder. He tightens his arm around her.

“What?” he asks.

She waves a hand vaguely in front of her, gesturing toward the smashed front windows of the video store and what Steve knows to be the toppled shelves and scattered movies inside. “First Scoops, now this. We’re a liability.”

And Steve can’t help it. He starts to laugh, softly at first and then increasingly hysterically. Robin doesn’t even lift her head when she starts laughing too. She just giggles into his shoulder, both of them laughing so hard after awhile that Steve can feel Robin’s tears dripping onto his neck and starting to soak his shirt.

“Fuck,” he gasps when he finally catches his breath, wiping at his own streaming eyes. “We’re gonna have to fucking move.”

“I’ll bet there’s a Family Video near Jonathan,” says Robin slyly, elbowing him in the ribs.

“Fuck you.”

“I guess I was wrong, you know. About them. That fight back there…I’ve never seen so much sexual tension in my _life._ ”

“Shut _up_ —”

Robin laughs again. When she quiets down, she lifts her head from Steve’s shoulder. She looks out across the parking lot. Steve knows what she’s looking at.

Nancy and Jonathan are sitting close together in the back of a different ambulance, talking quietly. They both look exhausted, but they have slight smiles on their faces. Steve feels his heart swell when he looks at them, and for the first time, the feeling isn’t painful. It’s just easy, uncomplicated happiness.

“Go talk to them,” says Robin quietly.

“I’m not gonna leave you,” he says automatically.

“Yes you are,” says Robin, “or I’m gonna kick your ass as soon as I can stand without crutches.”

He hesitates.

“ _Go,_ ” she says, pushing at him.

He carefully eases her weight off of him and makes sure she’s safely propped up, even though she no longer seems to be in any real danger of passing out. “I’ll be right back,” he murmurs.

Nancy and Jonathan look up as he approaches, but they don’t say anything until he’s standing right in front of them. Then Nancy pats the space next to her. He sits down.

“Hey,” says Nancy.

“Hey,” he says back. Then he looks across her at Jonathan and greets him separately. “Hey.”

Jonathan smiles. “Hey.”

All three of them laugh nervously. Steve looks down at his hands, fisted together in his lap.

Then he takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry about earlier,” he says, at the exact same moment that Jonathan blurts out, “I’m sorry for what I said before.”

There’s a slight pause, and another second of nervous laughter, before Jonathan continues.

“Everything we said—I mean, it was all true, yeah? But…I don’t care about any of that, Steve. Nancy was right. You’ve grown up. _I’ve_ grown up. We all have. And, uh. In case it wasn’t clear before.” He takes a deep breath. “I love you, too.”

Steve can feel himself blushing a little, and he can’t stop the goofy smile that’s spreading across his face. “Yeah?”

Jonathan laughs, a real laugh this time. “ _Yes,_ you asshole. I love you.”

“And I love you, too,” Nancy echoes. Her smile is as big as Steve’s feels, and there are tears in her eyes. “So, so much. We—I’m so in love with you, Steve.”

“I…” He has to swallow hard agains the sudden lump in his throat. “Fuck, you guys.”

“Someday,” says Nancy, and Steve lets out a strangled laugh while Jonathan seems to start choking.

Then Steve feels himself tugged down a little bit—Nancy’s wrapped an arm around his shoulders. When he looks over, he sees she’s done the same to Jonathan on her other side. She’s much too short for it to really work, and Steve and Jonathan both have to hunch uncomfortably for her to reach them, and when the both go to lean their cheeks against Nancy’s hair they knock their heads together, but it’s good.

It’s really, really good.

“I love you,” Steve whispers again, just to hear himself say it, just to let them hear it.

Jonathan’s hand finds Steve behind Nancy’s back, and Steve squeezes back tightly. He kisses the top of Nancy’s head. A moment later, Jonathan does the same.

His heart has never felt so full. 

Across the parking lot, Hopper is sitting on a stretcher with El tucked against him. Neither of them look like they’ll ever move again. Mrs. Byers is giving them some space for now, but Steve hasn’t missed the way she keeps looking over at them and smiling slightly, like she can’t help herself. She looks fond, and loving, and carefree, like she knows she’ll have time later.

And he and Nancy and Jonathan—they have time too, he realizes.

They have all the time in the world.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _We were lovers in a dangerous time  
>  We were lovers in a dangerous time  
> Lovers, lovers, lovers, oh  
> Lovers in a dangerous time_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s read this story, especially those of you who started with me back in November and are still on board now. This fic is very near and dear my heart, and I am endlessly grateful for all the positive feedback and encouragement and enthusiasm you’ve shown along the way. Love you all, and stay safe during these very strange (one could even say dangerous!) times. I hope you enjoy this final chapter <3

In the end, it’s decided that none of them should go home. ****

“It’s important that you all just continue like normal,” says one of the men in suits, the one Hopper and Mrs. Byers seem to know. Steve wants to laugh at that. Robin practically had her leg ripped off and El has super powers again and Hopper returned from the fucking _dead_ —but the man’s right, he knows. It’ll be the same as always, this time around. They’ll sign a few forms and show up on time to school and work and never, ever speak of it to anyone else.

But Steve isn’t going to complain, because _normal,_ this time, means going back to the Byers’ house. It means that instead of lying awake in his empty home—or worse, trying to come up with an explanation for his parents—he gets to keep all of the kids within his sight. He gets to stay near Hopper and Mrs. Byers’ comforting protectiveness. And he doesn’t have to part from Nancy and Jonathan.

He doesn’t get to stay with Robin, though.

“I can’t believe I’m leaving you alone in Hawkins again,” he says quietly to her. Mrs. Byers had invited her to come back with them, of course, but she’d had to refuse. The government people were adamant that she needed to go home now, before it got even harder to put together a believable cover story for why she’d snuck out at two in the morning on Thanksgiving and was now on crutches. “It didn’t exactly go well last time.”

“It’s only a couple more nights,” she reminds him. A smirk creeps onto her face. “And anyway, you need to go hang out with your boyfriend and girlfriend.”

He looks down, trying to hide his blushing smile, as if he could ever hide anything from Robin. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

She rolls her eyes at him, smiling too. “I’ll still see you Sunday.”

“See you Sunday.” Then he pulls her into a hug. “I’m really glad you’re okay,” he says quietly into her hair.

“I’m glad you’re okay, too,” says Robin, hugging him back. Then she pulls away and shoves his shoulder lightly. “I’ll be okay, fine. Really. You can go.”

He gives her a final squeeze before letting go. “Okay. I’m going,” he says.

He’s nearly reached the car where Nancy and Jonathan are waiting for him when she calls out again. “Steve!”

He turns back. “Yeah?”

“Drive safe.”

He grins at her. “Yes, Mom,” he says, and they both know what he really means is _I love you, too._

—

Somehow, they persuade Murray to take the kids so that the three of them can be alone together.

“You’re leaving us with _him?_ ” squawks Dustin indignantly when Steve breaks the news. “I thought you loved us!”

“I do,” says Steve. “But I’ve spent enough time in a car with you dipshits in the last couple days. I can’t take it anymore.”

“You’ve spent the same amount of time in the car with Nancy,” Will points out, reasonably enough. And then he adds with a completely straight face, “Not with Jonathan though, I guess.”

Steve opens his mouth to protest, already knowing that it’s useless given that God and everyone overheard his dramatic declaration in the video store. Then he closes it again, and looks at Will more closely. The kid is giving him just a shadow of a smirk. And Steve realizes suddenly that he’s known all along. The sarcastic _how are you, man_ at Jonathan’s house, the way he looked at Steve when he watched him talking to Jonathan and Nancy, the raised eyebrows when he caught Steve in Jonathan’s bed—“You’re not my favorite anymore,” he says in lieu of actually responding. Will’s smirk turns into a laugh, and Steve, though he’s trying to be annoyed, feels an overwhelming urge to hug the kid that he barely manages to contain.

The moment is quickly shattered when Dustin shouts, “Hey, I thought _I_ was your favorite!”

“You are now, anyway,” says Will calmly.

Steve rolls his eyes. “Just get in the car, shitheads.”

—

“This’ll definitely be the most I’ve ever road-tripped in twenty-four hours,” says Jonathan from the driver’s seat.

“Well,” says Nancy. “It’ll be closer to forty hours by the time we actually get there.”

Jonathan huffs a laugh, meeting Steve’s gaze with a smile as he turns around to back the car out of its parking space. “Thanks, Nance. That makes me feel much better.”

“Wait a minute,” says Steve. "You didn’t even have to _do_ the first drive. Pretty sure Nance and I are the ones who are suffering here.”

“Oh, _suffering?_ Are you sick of us already, Harrington?”

Nancy’s tone is teasing, and she turns in her seat as she says it to grin at Steve. Still, the question makes his heart swell. “I could never be sick of you,” he says honestly.

Her smile turns softer, fonder. “Good,” she says quietly.

She turns back around to face forward again, and a long silence follows. It’s an easy silence, though, a comfortable one, and Steve is content to let it wash over him. From his position in the back, he can see Nancy’s face in profile, and Jonathan’s eyes reflected back at him in the rearview mirror. The sight of them calms him in an inexplicable, bone-deep way.

“I know we should talk about this,” says Nancy eventually. Steve isn’t sure how much time has passed, but they’re well out of Hawkins now, surrounded only by thick trees. “This— _us._ How this is going to work. But right now, I honestly just…” She pauses for a long moment, then says decisively, “I’m not worried.”

“I am,” says Jonathan. “But not about any of the parts that matter.”

Steve hums in agreement. Jonathan’s put it into words nicely, he thinks. Steve _is_ worried, or at least knows that he should be, but everything he’s concerned about—their families, the gossip, the world at large—all of that seems small, irrelevant. He’s got Nancy and Jonathan. Them, he’s sure about.

Then Nancy yawns loudly, and Steve, as if on cue, yawns in response. He lets his eyes slide shut, turning his face toward the window to absorb what he can of the weak November sunlight. He thinks this might be one of the first times he’s felt sleepy in months—properly sleepy, not just exhausted, with all the peace and contentedness that it implies.

He suspects Nancy and Jonathan feel the same way. The same calm lasts the entire trip, across several states and three gas station breaks and switching drivers a few times. They exchange only a few soft words. They love each other. For now, there’s nothing else to say.

—

“Steve.” A gentle hand is on his leg, rubbing it lightly. “We’re here.”

He blinks slowly awake, picking himself up from where he’s slumped against the window. “Hmph?”

A low, quiet laugh. “We’re here.”

Steve squints. He can just make out Jonathan, turned around in the passenger seat so that he can reach Steve’s knee. He’s smiling softly at him. “Oh,” says Steve, and Jonathan laughs again, and from the driver’s seat Nancy says teasingly, “You’re such a deep sleeper.”

Really, the _oh_ wasn’t a noise of surprise, wasn’t an acknowledgement of what Jonathan was telling him. It was a completely involuntary exclamation, a whisper forced from his lungs by the sheer force of the _feeling_ in Steve’s chest at waking up to find Jonathan looking at him like that, touching him like that. He doesn’t correct them, though.

Around them, he hears the sounds of the other cars parking, of doors opening and slamming shut and the inevitable rush of noise as the kids burst out. Murray is saying something, his voice raised slightly, though Steve can’t quite make out the words.

“It’s a miracle he didn’t drive into a tree with all those kids in the car,” says Nancy. “I almost feel bad for him.”

“Hm. I don’t.”

Slowly, sleepily, Steve undoes his seatbelt and climbs out of the car. For a long moment, he just stands there in the driveway. He feels oddly raw, oddly vulnerable, as if he’s a small child relieved to finally be home at the end of a very long journey. In some strange way, he supposes that isn’t too far from the truth. He turns his face upwards, breathing deeply the crisp night air. Then he feels a warmth against his back, and a pair of arms winds around his waist.

“What are you doing?” Nancy murmurs into his shoulder blade.

“Mm. Nothing.” He keeps looking up at the sky, where a few faint stairs are just visible.

Another set of arms closes around him, and he realizes that Jonathan has joined the embrace, pressing behind Nancy to wrap himself around both of them. “It’s late,” he murmurs. “We should go inside.”

“Okay,” Steve agrees, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t want to do anything to disrupt the feeing of both their arms holding him close, the comfort of their warmth contrasted with the chilly air. He brings his hands up to cover Nancy’s where they rest against his stomach, and after a moment, Jonathan’s hands move to cover his. Steve breathes out a long, contented sigh, and watches as Hopper gently lifts a sleeping El from the backseat of Mrs. Byers’ car. He shifts her in his arms to get a better grip, and presses a kiss absently to her temple as he exchanges a few soft words with Mrs. Byers. The three of them follow the kids and Murray into the house.

“We should go inside,” Jonathan says again, and this time Steve feels Nancy nod against his back and their arms unwind from around him.

It’s bright inside—not jarring, but the sort of light that feels like a relief after driving so long in the dark. There are voices all around, quiet and indistinct and somehow immensely comforting, as the kids search for food in the kitchen and Hopper and Mrs. Byers continue their conversation in the living room. Steve stops just inside the front door.

“Steve?” says Jonathan, turning back to look at him when he realizes he’s stopped. “You okay?”

Steve can only nod. There’s a lump in his throat suddenly, and he realizes with a vague mix of amusement and embarrassment that he might be about to cry in the Byers’ front entryway for the second time in as many days. It’s for entirely different reasons this time, though. He doesn’t think he could possibly put any of those reasons into words right now, but based on the way Nancy and Jonathan are both looking at him—all warm and soft and full of understanding—he doesn’t think he needs to.

“Come on,” says Nancy gently, taking his hand in hers. “Let’s go to bed.”

They don’t go to bed right away. They’re filthy, all three of them, still covered in sweat and grime and blood that isn’t entirely their own. They shower separately. Steve is relieved, a bit, that neither of them suggested doing it together. It’s not that he doesn’t want them—he _does,_ desperately. But not like this, while they’re washing away the remains of another day of monster fighting. Not now, when all he really wants is to hold them and be held in return.

And when they finally climb into Jonathan’s bed, warm and damp-haired and pliant with sleepiness, that’s what he does. He lies on his back with an arm wrapped around Nancy, who immediately rests her head against his chest with a contented sigh. Jonathan presses himself to her back and throws an arm across both of them.

“Is this okay?” he whispers.

In response, Steve lays his hand on top of Jonathan’s, trapping it there. “More than okay.”

For a long time they lie in silence, just breathing. Though he doesn’t think he’s ever felt so pleasantly sleepy, Steve has no expectation of actually falling asleep. He did enough of that in the car, and besides, he wants to be awake for this. He wants to savor every moment of lying in bed with Nancy and Jonathan.

 _But this won’t be the last time,_ he reminds himself, and he’s unable to stop himself from smiling silently up at the ceiling. He doesn’t have to cling to these moments anymore, doesn’t have to hoard them away like each time they touch him might be the last. He still wants to, though. In the dark, Nancy and Jonathan both in his arms, he vows to himself to never, ever take this for granted.

He doesn’t know whether an hour has passed on ten minutes when he next speaks, fairly certain that both of them, though silent, are also still awake. “When did you know?” he asks quietly.

“Know what?”

“That…you know. This.”

“That we love you?” He can hear the smile in Nancy’s voice. “Steve, I don’t think I ever stopped. Not really.”

He takes a minute to process that information silently. “Then why…” He isn’t sure how to phrase the question in a way that doesn’t sound silly, or clingy, or accusing. He doesn’t want a serious conversation about their relationship right now, not really. But it’s never been simple, the three of them. Every bit of it, right up until now, has been fraught with _something,_ and a part of him knows that he won’t be able to fully relax until he understands the contours of what led them to this moment. “Why did we break up?”

There is a long pause before Nancy answers. “I was in love with Jonathan,” she says eventually, quietly. “I always had been, I think, ever since the first time with the Demogorgon, and after that night—when you said he took me home, and then when he helped me expose the lab—I was in love with Jonathan. And I didn’t—I loved you, I _did_ , but we weren’t right for each other, Steve. Not then.”

Steve’s instinct is to argue with her, to insist that they’ve always been meant for each other. But he knows she’s right. Meant for each other or not, he wasn’t what she needed then. And if he’s being really honest with himself, she wasn’t what he needed either.

“But we’ve grown up now,” he says softly, echoing her words from earlier.

“Yeah,” she says, “we have.”

“When did _you_ know, Steve?” asks Jonathan. His voice is low, rough with sleepiness but still entirely coherent.

“About Nancy? Always. I convinced myself I’d moved on, but then after Starcourt…I don’t think I ever got over her, really. You don’t just get over Nancy Wheeler, you know?”

“Yeah,” says Jonathan. “I know.”

Steve smiles and rubs his thumb absently over Jonathan’s knuckles. “You took a little longer, though.”

“Yeah?” Jonathan murmurs. He doesn’t sound hurt or judgmental, just interested and maybe a little amused.

“Yeah. I don’t know when I started loving you. Maybe it was just last summer, or maybe it was longer ago—it _was_ longer ago, I think—but I didn’t realize it till after you moved. I think…” He takes a deep breath. He’s never discussed _this_ part of it with anyone but Robin, but there’s no real reason he should be nervous about it. They are, after all, in the exact same position as him; at least, Jonathan is. “I think part of why it took me so long was I never thought I was…you know.”

“Yeah,” says Jonathan.

“Did you know?” Steve asks, genuinely curious. He’s never really considered it, he realizes. “That you…like both?”

Jonathan shifts a little, and Steve’s pretty sure that if he could see his face he’d find him blushing. “Yeah. I, uh. I’ve known for awhile.” He pauses. “So, you know, you were right when you called me a queer.”

Steve takes a sharp breath. They’ve already had this argument once today, and they’ve already agreed to forget about it and move on, but he still feels a pang of guilt when he’s reminded of the person he used to be. “Takes one to know one, I guess,” he says eventually, and he’s worried that the joke might sound a little bit forced, but Jonathan laughs quietly. It’s enough to ease the momentary tension.

“You know,” Jonathan says after a long silence, “Nancy wasn’t the only one in those pictures.”

“What?”

“Those pictures. That I took at your house? I—there was Nancy, yeah, but you were in those pictures too. You were part of what made it so—I don’t know. Captivating. And I know it was wrong,” he adds hastily, “I still shouldn’t have taken them, I just—”

“It’s okay,” says Steve. “We’ve grown up, remember?”

“Yeah,” sighs Jonathan. “Yeah. I just…it’s always been the two of you, is what I’m trying to say. From the very beginning. It was always both of you.”

At that, Steve feels his throat start to tighten. Tears prick at the corners of his eyes. _It was always both of you._

“Jonathan and I talked about it…a month after Starcourt, maybe?” Nancy’s voice is a little muffled, her head pressed against Steve’s chest. “About how we felt about you. And we wanted to tell you, we did, but it was never the right time, and then there was Robin—”

Steve lets out a soft breath of laughter. “I still can’t believe you thought I was dating Robin. I was _so obvious_ around you guys.”

“ _We_ were so obvious _,_ Steve,” rejoins Nancy. “How did you not pick up on it?”

“I’ve been told that I’m an idiot, Nancy Wheeler.”

She turns her face farther into his chest, burying her giggle in his shirt. “Yeah, you are.” Then softer, more seriously: “And I love you.”

His breath catches in his throat. “I love you, too,” he murmurs.

“I love you, three,” says Jonathan. It makes Nancy snort, and Steve lets out a startled laugh. Then Jonathan joins in, and it’s a long few minutes before their laughter dies down again.

When it does, he pulls them both a little closer. Finally, he feels sleep beginning to tug at him, threatening to take him under. With a contented sigh—Nancy warm against his chest, Jonathan’s arm draped over his stomach—he lets it.

—

It’s barely four in the morning when Steve slips out of bed, carefully extricating himself from Nancy’s arms so that he can go to the kitchen for a glass of water. He has no intention of staying awake long; his plan is just to quench his thirst and then rejoin Nancy and Jonathan to sleep for about a million more hours. To his surprise, though, when he enters the kitchen, he finds that there’s already someone else sitting at the kitchen table.

“What are you doing up?” he asks, and Max jumps so badly that water sloshes out of her glass. He hurries to grab a dishtowel off the counter and mops up the slowly spreading puddle on the table. “Shit, sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” Then he catches a glimpse of her face for the first time. “Hey,” he says more gently, growing concerned, “are you okay? What’s going on?”

Her eyes are red and puffy, and she’s scrubbing roughly at her cheeks with a sleeve pulled over her hand. “I’m fine,” she mutters.

“Max,” he sighs. Selfishly, he doesn’t want to deal with this right now. It’s been an exhausting couple of days, and all he wants is to go back to bed with the loves of his life. But he knows he can’t leave one of the kids like this, especially not _Max,_ who never cries. He tosses the towel back onto the counter and then pulls out a chair to sit across from her. “It’s the middle of the night and all your friends are here and you’re crying alone in the kitchen.”

“I’m not _crying._ ”

Part of him wants to roll his eyes at that, but her voice is so high and tight as she says it, so choked with suppressed tears, that he can’t feel anything but a stab of pain for her. Still, he concedes the point, hoping that maybe if he grants her this then she’ll be a little more willing to open up to him. “Fine, you’re not crying,” he says. “Can you at least tell me why you’re not sleeping?”

She shrugs, then takes a shaky sip of water from her near-empty glass.

“Look,” he says after the silence has stretched on almost to the point of being uncomfortable. “I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you really want. Or I can go get Lucas or El or—”

“Not El,” says Max quickly—angrily, almost, Steve thinks. He frowns.

“Is something going on with El?” he asks. “Did you guys…fight, or something?” He can’t really imagine that being the case. Max and El were inseparable during El’s last weeks in Hawkins and were nothing short of joyous when they greeted each other the other day, and there’s hardly been time since then for a falling-out. And besides, he knows Max. If she were angry with her friend, she’d be confronting her directly, not sitting at the Byers’ kitchen table fighting tears.

Max shakes her head. Then she wipes at her eyes again and says, “I just…I’m really glad that Hopper’s back?”

Steve blinks at her, surprised. They’re all glad Hopper’s back, of course, but it’s not at all what he expected her to say. These definitely don’t seem to be happy tears. He waits for her to continue, and after a long pause, she does.

“But…” She sniffles, and then takes another sip of water. It makes Steve’s heart ache for her. Swallowing something down to keep the sobs at bay—he knows that trick. “El was the only one who really got it? And now…”

She trails off, but Steve understands suddenly why she’s so upset. “Now she doesn’t get it anymore. Because Hopper came back, and—and Billy isn’t going to.”

Max lets a long, shaky sigh out through her teeth. “Yeah.”

“Shit, Max,” he says. “That…” _That sucks,_ he wants to say, because it _does,_ but it’s so obvious that to say it out loud to her seems almost insulting. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” she says again, quietly.

Steve hesitates before speaking, trying to choose his words carefully. He’s never really talked about Billy’s death with Max, except for that one day in his kitchen all those months ago. He doesn’t really feel like he’s the best person for the job, given his and Billy’s history. Eventually he says softly, “You know you’re still allowed to miss him.”

“I don’t miss—”

“Okay, sorry, bad choice of words. I just meant—it’s okay if you’re still sad, you know? You can be happy that Hopper’s back, and you can be happy for El, and you can also still be sad about Billy.”

“I know,” says Max. “It’s just…no one else is sad, now? And I know that’s awful of me,” she adds quickly, as if afraid that Steve is going to reprimand her for saying that. “I don’t actually _want_ everyone else to be sad, obviously, I’m glad that they’re happy now, but—” She breaks off. He can tell she’s struggling to find the words, and waits patiently. “Billy was a dick, and nobody misses him, people are probably just glad that he’s gone, and him dying didn’t matter to anyone except me, and he _deserved_ that, because he was such a—but it fucking _hurts,_ Steve. It hurts being the only one who misses him.” She’s crying again now, tears spilling silently from her eyes, and she swipes them angrily away. “And at least before I could _pretend_ that it mattered for everyone else, because they were sad too, and I was sad _with_ everyone, but really they were all just sad because of Hopper, and he’s back now, so now I’m the only one who’s sad, and I still feel like I _shouldn’t_ be, because he was a terrible person and I didn’t even love him while he was alive and he _definitely_ didn’t love me, but—”

“Max.” He reaches across the table to take her hand, squeezing it tightly. She’s looking down, her shoulders shaking, breath hitching. “Hey. Just take a deep breath, okay?”

She breathes in, loudly but probably not deeply, and then blows it out in a long exhale. Steve breathes with her, feeling wildly out of his depth. Jonathan would be better at this. Even _Mike_ would probably be better at this. But, he reminds himself firmly, Max is _his_ kid. He loves her like a little sister—loves her the way Billy should have, he thinks bitterly, then tries to push that thought away because it’s sort of the opposite of helpful right now. And he owes it to her to do his best.

He doesn’t have the words to help her. So instead he stands and moves to her side of the table and holds open his arms.

“I know it’s hard,” he says to the top of her head, wrapping an arm around her as she leans into him. “But you’re gonna be okay.”

“I know,” Max mumbles into his shoulder. “But right now it just sucks.”

“Yeah, it does.” He holds her in silence for a few minutes, and then says, a little hesitantly, “I know this doesn’t fix things. But I’m here for you, you know? And all your little nerd friends, they’re here for you too.”

Max leans back from him, wiping her face on her sleeve, and makes a valiant attempt at a smile. “Thanks, Steve,” she says, and her voice is still shaking a little, but she sounds a bit better.

He isn’t sure what to say— _you’re welcome_ seems trite, somehow—so he just smiles back at her.

Then she takes a deep breath and square her shoulders. She pushes a lock of hair out of her face. “Sorry to keep you away from Nancy and Jonathan,” she says. He can just barely tell that she’s teasing him.

Under different circumstances he’d whack her lightly, call her a shitbird and remind her that he can stop providing rides to the arcade whenever he likes. But these aren’t different circumstances. These are _these_ circumstances, so he just says, honestly, “It’s okay.”

—

“I’m sorry the turkey’s so dry,” says Mrs. Byers as they begin their belated feast. “And the potatoes—I did my best, but—”

“Mom,” interrupts Jonathan. “It’s great. Everything’s amazing.”

El nods vigorously in agreement. “It’s better than Hop’s cooking.”

 _“Hey!”_ says Hopper, but Steve can tell he’s fighting a smile. “My cooking is fine.”

“Friends don’t lie,” El says, poking him lightly. “Your cooking is bad. Joyce’s cooking is…less bad.”

Hopper laughs loudly at that. “Thank you, sweetheart,” says Mrs. Byers wryly. Then she raises her wine glass. “Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. May this year be more peaceful than the last.”

“Hear, hear,” says Murray, knocking his glass against hers with perhaps a little more force than necessary.

Looking around at them all, Steve can’t help but privately disagree. It’s the day after Thanksgiving, technically, but he can’t remember when he last felt so much like he was celebrating a real holiday. This morning, he was laughing at Dustin and Lucas’s attempt to reenact the Thanksgiving Day parade, which El was disappointed to have missed on TV yesterday. He was watching Mrs. Byers argue with Murray over the best way to cook a turkey while Hopper grumbled loudly that they were both doing it wrong. He was peeling potatoes at the sink between Nancy and Jonathan, all three of them stealing glances at each other when they thought the others weren’t looking.

Now they’re all gathered around the kitchen table—even more crowded now with the addition of Hopper and Murray—with heaping plates of the meal they missed out on yesterday. It’s warm and safe and happy and Steve is surrounded by people who he loves, people he’d lay down his life for. People he _has_ tried to lay down his life for, more than once now.

He knows what Mrs. Byers means. He isn’t _glad,_ exactly, that the last couple years have been such a disaster, and he certainly doesn’t want a repeat of any of the shit that’s happened. He isn’t glad that all these kids are so deeply traumatized now, or that Hopper’s jumping at every loud noise, or that Robin’s at home with a torn-up leg that could easily have been a whole worse.

But they’re all still here. And though he raises his glass to Mrs. Byers’ toast, Steve, sitting wedged between what he knows to be the two great loves of his life, finds that he doesn’t regret any of it.

—

“Hello?”

“Robs, hey. It’s me.”

“Hey, dingus.” Her voice is a little bit distorted with the distance, but it’s still her, and Steve feels the slight tension that’s been in his chest since he left her unspool. “Miss me already?”

“Yeah,” he says honestly. “How’s the leg?”

“Still fucked,” she answers, but she sounds cheerful about it.

Steve leans against the wall, smiling slightly. He watches Nancy and Hopper in the kitchen, their backs turned to him as they wash dishes side by side, having been the only two with wills strong enough to get Mrs. Byers to relax and leave the rest of the work to them. “What’d you tell your parents?”

“Apparently coyotes are a real problem this time of year.”

He laughs loudly, and Jonathan glances up at him with a smile from where he’s sitting on the living room floor playing a board game with the kids. “What, and a coyote dragged you out your bedroom window at three in the morning?”

“No, _that_ was my friend Cara, who had a boy emergency in the middle of the night and needed me desperately. The coyote attack happened while Cara and I were wandering the woods quite irresponsibly, failing to pay attention to our surroundings in the midst of our _very_ engaging discussion about her young broken heart. We got a bit lost, too, which is why it took me so long to get home again.”

Steve chuckles again. “Hawkins kids really need to get better at navigating the woods.”

“We really do,” agrees Robin. Then she lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “And how are _you,_ lovebird?”

“I’m…” He trails off, looking for the right words to describe the way he’s just felt _lighter_ these past twenty-four hours. “I’m happy, Robs. I really am.”

“Good,” she says softly. “Look, I’ve gotta go, my mom’s making me go Black Friday shopping with her. Apparently being ‘gravely injured’ and ‘on crutches’ isn’t a good enough excuse to get out of it. But I’ll see you in a couple days, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” says Steve. She sounds so animated and he can perfectly envision the face she’s making, all scrunched up in annoyance, and he knows that she’s putting air quotes around her words even though he isn’t there to see them. He’s pretty sure his own voice sounds disgustingly fond. “Have fun shopping.”

She makes a gagging noise. “Gross. Have fun being in love, or whatever.”

“I will,” he promises.

“But not _too_ much fun!”

He wishes she were here so that the he could flash her his middle finger.

As soon as he hangs up, Dustin shouts from the living room, “Dude, get back in here, we need you! Jonathan and El are _killing_ us!”

So, smiling, he goes.

—

Steve wouldn’t have thought it possible after the amount of sugar they went through today, but somehow, all of the kids are asleep. Except for El, tucked against Hopper’s side in the big armchair, they’re all sprawled on the floor in a mess of pillows and blankets. Steve could watch them sleep forever, he thinks. He hopes that isn’t creepy. He doesn’t mean it to be creepy. It’s just that it’s so rare to see them like this, so still and peaceful and utterly vulnerable. So much like the kids that they really still are. Even Mike manages to look a little bit endearing while he’s asleep.

The end of _It’s a Wonderful Life_ is playing on the Byers’ TV, though between the steady rain outside and Mrs. Byers having turned down the volume once the last kid nodded off, Steve can barely hear it. He doesn’t mind. He hasn’t been terribly focused on the movie anyway, not with Nancy and Jonathan pressed close on either side of him. Nancy’s head is resting on his shoulder, and he’s not actually sure whether she’s still awake. Jonathan is holding his hand.

He’d tensed up a bit when they first cuddled up to him at the start of the movie. All the kids were there, after all, and Hopper, and Jonathan’s _mom_ —but they all knew already, he supposed. Steve would have preferred to keep their relationship private for a bit, he thinks, but any hope of that vanished when he loudly confessed his love in front of everybody. And really, it isn’t so bad. He’s certain he’ll be getting an earful from Dustin soon enough, and probably the other kids as well, but for now he and Nancy and Jonathan have gotten away with a couple smirks thrown their way by Dustin and Lucas and Will, a bit of exaggerated gagging from Max, a vague look of resigned irritation from Mike, and what seemed to be a genuine smile from El. Mrs. Byers had just shaken her head fondly at them when she noticed the hand-holding.

Now, as _Auld Lang Syne_ fades out and the credits start to roll, Mrs. Byers picks her way across the kid-strewn floor to turn off the TV. “Think it’s worth trying to get them to bed?” she asks Hopper in a low murmur.

Hopper groans slightly but jostles El a little bit to wake her, speaking quietly to her. Mrs. Byers crouches down to do the same to Will.

The kids wake slowly, stretching and yawning in a way that Steve tries not to find quite as adorable as he does. There’s a pillow crease on Lucas’s cheek, and Will’s hair is sticking up in every direction, and El keeps rubbing her eyes, and Steve thinks it’s entirely possible that his heart might explode.

A few minutes later, the kids have disappeared to bed, and Mrs. Byers and Hopper too have vanished. Steve and Nancy and Jonathan are left alone in the living room.

The only sound now is the gentle rain, and with the lights dim and Jonathan and Nancy warm on either side of him, Steve thinks he might never move again. With the watchful adults and teasing kids gone now, he lets himself relax even more fully, leaning into Jonathan and ducking down to rest his head again his shoulder.

“Hey there.” Jonathan’s voice is soft and warm with amusement. Steve feels a light kiss pressed to the top of his head, and can’t help the soft noise of contentment that escapes him. Jonathan laughs. The sound is low, husky, and Steve feels something beyond the usual warmth running through him—it’s a burning, almost, a pleasant ache, and before he can think too hard about it, he’s turning his head to kiss the hollow where Jonathan’s neck meets his shoulder, just above the collar of his sweater.

Jonathan tenses a bit, but Steve doesn’t think it’s a bad sort of tensing.

On his other side, Nancy stirs, making a sleepy noise in the back of her throat and wrapping both her arms around one of Steve’s as if to trap it there. Steve isn’t certain she’s entirely awake, but then she mumbles, “Where’d everyone go?”

“Bed,” he murmurs back.

“Mm.” She nuzzles into his shoulder, and then—Steve’s heart skips a bit—does the exact same thing that he’s just done to Jonathan, and presses a kiss just above his collarbone.

Steve must go tense the same way Jonathan did, because Nancy lifts her head, jostling him a bit so that she can meet his eyes. “Is this okay?” she asks softly.

 _Yes,_ Steve wants to say, _yes, yes, yes,_ but his voice is stuck in his throat. Silently, he nods.

It occurs to him, as Nancy smiles and tilts her head up to kiss the side of his jaw, that this is the opposite of how it had been that first time with her. Then, he’d been the one in control—he’d been the one to cross the room, to take her in his arms, to kiss her lower and lower while she looked at him with such tender vulnerability. Maybe that was why it hadn’t worked for them, then. Nancy never was the vulnerable one not really. The vulnerable one—he sighs in contentment as she kisses his temple, just barely missing the corner of his eye—maybe that had always been him.

“Nance,” he starts to say, but however he was going to finish that sentence, it’s cut off by her pressing her lips, finally, against his. His mind goes utterly blank, blissfully blank, as he opens his mouth to kiss her fully back.

It isn’t like he remembers. It’s exhilarating still, but not in the same way it used to be. Back then, kissing Nancy had been like something new and dangerous and exciting, a teenaged thrill. This time, there’s something indescribably adult about it, something mature. It feels like something clicking into place. It feels like a foregone conclusion.

“I love you,” Nancy whispers into his mouth, “I love you, I love you.”

“ _Nance,”_ he says again, and this time it’s a complete thought. He runs his hands down her arms, then moves them to her waist, her hips. She’s raised herself a bit, no longer sitting beside him on the sofa but kneeling, moving so that she’s got one of his legs straddled between her own. Her knee just barely brushes against his crotch and he gasps involuntarily.

Then she pulls back with a grin that’s equal parts tender and filthy. All her sleepiness is gone. “I’ve missed you,” she murmurs.

“Yes,” says Steve breathlessly.

“But now—” she slides off his lap, ignoring his whine of protest—“I think we should give Jonathan a turn, don’t you?”

Steve turns to see Jonathan watching them with eyes he can only describe as hungry, and something leaps inside of him, like his stomach is jumping right up into his lungs.

“Hey,” whispers Jonathan, the corners of his eyes crinkling with a smile.

Steve takes a deep breath and reaches up to cup the side of Jonathan’s face. “Hey,” he whispers back. Jonathan’s face is broad, a little rough with stubble, but the skin so smooth. Steve rubs his thumb wonderingly over his cheek.

Then Jonathan has his hands on Steve’s chest, and for one terrifying moment, Steve thinks he’s going to push him away. Instead, he grabs the material of Steve’s sweater, gently pulling him in.

And then they’re kissing. It’s slower than with Nancy, softer. It fills him up in an entirely different way, and _god—_ he feels like his entire body is thrumming with electricity, _like a sexual electricity,_ he’d told Dustin, only this isn’t like that, this is _better,_ this is—

He isn’t really aware of having moved, but he’s pressed close to Jonathan now, one hand buried in his hair and the other just above his waist, holding him close. He moves closer still, practically into Jonathan’s lap, and can’t help the moan that escapes him when he realizes how hard Jonathan is.

 _“Fuck,_ ” Steve whispers. Behind him, Nancy laughs, a low, heady sound.

“We should—” Jonathan’s voice comes out strangled.

“Yeah,” breathes Steve. “Yeah, lets—”

They barely make it to Jonathan’s bedroom.

—

Sunday morning comes too quickly. It’s a cold, clear day, the sunlight thin and watery and fragile-looking. The grass is sharp and brittle, the previous day’s rain having turned to ice on the ground. It crunches loudly under Steve’s feet as he crosses the lawn.

“Well,” says Jonathan quietly. He’s shivering slightly in just his thin hoodie, arms wrapped around his torso to keep warm. “I guess this is it, then.”

Nancy shakes her head. “Don’t say it like that,” she says forcefully.

“Yeah, man,” says Steve. He carefully keeps his voice light even though he feels like he’s about two seconds away from crying. This is harder for Jonathan than it is for him, he reminds himself. Jonathan’s the one getting left behind, the one who has to watch Steve and Nancy drive away without him. “We’ll see you at Christmas, right? Only a month away.” It’ll be an agonizingly long month, and he knows that Jonathan knows this as well as he does, but he refuses to acknowledge that now. “And we’ll call you, like, all the time.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Jonathan takes a deep breath and smiles shakily. “Okay. You’re right.”

“Might be a first,” says Nancy. Steve makes a noise of protest, but he doesn’t mean it. The comment makes Jonathan laugh a little, and that’s the only thing that matters.

“Okay,” says Jonathan again. “So, this _isn’t_ it.”

“Not even a little bit.”

“And I’ll see you two soon.”

“You’ll see us _so_ soon.”

“Right. Right.” And then Jonathan blows out a long puff of breath, visible in the cold air, and holds open his arms. “I’ll miss you,” he mumbles into Steve’s shoulder after they’ve both moved forward to embrace him.

Steve pulls him closer, wrapping his arms tightly around both him and Nancy. He kisses Jonathan’s temple. It’s still a marvel to him, that he can just _do_ that. He tries not to think too hard about how it’ll be a month before he can do it again.

They stand still like that for a long time before Nancy eventually pulls away. “Okay,” she says, wiping at her eyes, which are much more watery than they were a couple of minutes ago. “We’ll be okay. We’ve done this before.”

Jonathan nods, then leans down to kiss Nancy. Then he tilts his head up to kiss Steve.

Steve just barely manages not to cry. He kisses Jonathan back, trying to put a whole month’s worth of love into it. And then he’s taking Nancy’s hand, and they’re walking to the car, and Steve is getting into the driver’s seat and putting on his seatbelt and starting the engine.

The kids in the backseat are tired and subdued after their own tearful goodbyes, for which Steve is grateful. He couldn’t force any words out of his throat right now if he wanted to.

As he pulls backwards out of the driveway, he doesn’t take his eyes off Jonathan’s face, and he doesn’t let go of Nancy’s hand.

—

It’s strange, returning to Hawkins without Jonathan—returning to his normal life, his normal routines. He and Robin aren’t fired—they have the cover story of a break-in to thank for that—and he still spends most days working at the video store, once it’s open again with the damage repaired. He does his job, and he drives the kids wherever they want him to and gives them too much of his own money for the arcade, and he rattles around his empty house, just like he did before. Sometimes, when he isn’t paying attention, it’s easy to forget that anything’s changed.

Things are different now, though. They’re better. Now, Nancy comes by the video store every day after school, leans her elbows on the counter and gets him in trouble with Keith for chatting too long. Sometimes, when the store is empty, she’ll hop up on the counter to kiss him.

“You’re gonna get me fired,” he says when she does that.

“You hate this job anyway,” she reminds him, and kisses him again.

She’s warming up to Robin, too. Steve had hoped they’d be fast friends with the romantic misunderstanding out of the way, but they’re still so different. The priss and the band nerd. Steve can’t think of a single thing they have in common, other than himself and their shared history of monster-fighting. They’re trying, though. One afternoon, he emerges from the back room to find Nancy already there, laughing at something Robin’s just said. He doesn’t stop smiling for hours after that.

They talk to Jonathan as much as possible—a few times a week, if not more. It hurts, only hearing the version of his voice that’s cracked and distorted over the long-distance call. But it’s still his voice. Steve doesn’t know how he survived so long without being able to call Jonathan like this. And it’s not just Jonathan—it’s El and Will giggling in the background, or stealing the phone for a few minutes to tell Steve and Nancy about the cat they found wandering the neighborhood. Joyce shouting from the other side of the room to make sure they’re taking care of themselves. Even Hopper got on the phone once, asked Nancy about school and chatted briefly with Steve about the Pacers.

It’s apparently permanent, Hopper living there with them. Steve had hoped a bit that with Hopper back the Byers might return to Hawkins—but Hawkins doesn’t feel like home anymore, Jonathan admits to them one afternoon in the middle of December. He says it quietly, guiltily, as if worried that Steve and Nancy will take that personally.

“It’s not that I don’t miss you two,” he goes on hurriedly. “I’d give anything not to live so far away, but—”

“Jonathan,” Nancy interrupts him. “It’s okay. We get it.”

He sighs, the sound long and crackling over the phone. “It hasn’t felt like home in a long time, if I’m being honest. And my mom would never move back. After everything that town did to my brother and si—and El—I don’t think I could ever move back there, either.”

Steve doesn’t comment on the slip, but he shares a secret smile with Nancy that, if Jonathan were there to see it, he knows would make him blush.

It’s not until late that night, after Nancy has gone home and he’s lying in bed, that Steve really thinks about what it means for Jonathan to never want to live in Hawkins again. He hadn’t really _expected_ the Byers to come back, of course, and he could never have pictured Jonathan returning to small-town Indiana by his own choice. Jonathan’s destined for bigger things—Nancy, too—and Steve’s never doubted that they’ll achieve whatever it is they puts their minds to. But for the first time, Steve finds himself wondering anxiously what the future could possibly look like for the three of them. He’s always sort of assumed that he’ll be in Hawkins forever, but if Nancy and Jonathan want out…

He’d go anywhere to be with them. And he wouldn’t mind being farther away from the monster capital of America. But there’s also the kids, and Robin, and how could ever forgive himself if he left them all behind?

But he won’t press it now, he decides. He won’t ruin this wonderful thing they have going on by worrying too much about the future. They’ll figure it out. They always do.

—

_“Byers!”_ shouts Dustin, already tearing across the yard before Steve’s even shut the engine off. He collides with Will, who staggers a bit on impact and then falls fully to the ground, laughing, as Mike, Lucas, and Max barrel into him as well. Then El runs out from the house, barefoot despite the dusting of snow, and the yelling is renewed as everyone jumps back up to launch themselves at her.

“El, you’re gonna get frostbite!” Nancy calls with a grin as she gets out of the car and slams the passenger door shut behind her.

“No, I won’t!” she shouts back over Mike’s shoulder.

“She’s got her _looove_ to keep her warm,” says Lucas, and laughs when El sticks her tongue out at him.

“I don’t know how much that’ll help.”

His voice sounds different in person than it does over the phone. Steve already knew that, of course. He’s spent the past month lamenting the difference, and imagining how it’ll sound when he finally gets to hear it up close again. And yet. And yet. He isn’t prepared. He’s never been prepared for any part of Jonathan.

Jonathan’s standing on the porch, arms crossed over his chest and shoulders shrugged up in that ridiculous, endearing way of his. He’s grinning almost sheepishly— _well, here I am,_ his smile seems to say. _Hope it was worth the drive._

Last time he pulled into the Byers’ driveway, Steve had hesitated in the car while Nancy ran into Jonathan’s arms, then unpacked the trunk as slowly as he could manage to delay the inevitable, excruciating greeting. Now, the memory makes him almost shy. He doesn’t throw himself at Jonathan the way Nancy immediately does. Instead he walks slowly, picking his way deliberately across the snow-dusted yard. There’s a nervous anticipation building in his stomach. For a brief, agonizing second, he wonders if Jonathan will still want him. It seems suddenly plausible that he might have decided that Nancy is enough for him after all, and that he’ll tell Steve to turn around and go home.

But then he’s reached the porch, and he barely has a second to take Jonathan in—just the _fact_ of him, so close, so real—before Jonathan is pulling Steve in for a hug. Steve’s heart is pounding as he wraps his arms around Jonathan, holding him tightly. Jonathan must be able to feel it because he says quietly against Steve’s neck, “You nervous?”

“A little,” he admits.

“Why?”

He laughs a little: at himself, at Jonathan, at everything. “I don’t know.”

Jonathan moves his hands to Steve’s waist and leans up to kiss him, lightly, on the lips. “I’ve missed you.” Then he pulls back a bit, turns his smile to Nancy, who’s watching them fondly. “Both of you.”

“Alright, break it up,” says a gruff voice behind them. “You’re blocking the door.”

Hopper looks better than he did at Thanksgiving. His beard’s been trimmed back to its usual length and he seems to have put on a few pounds. He’s scowling at the three of them, but Steve’s pretty sure there’s no real severity in it. “Hi, Chief,” he says.

“Hey, kid. Nancy.”

Mrs. Byers appears in the doorway next to him. “Oh! Steve, Nancy, it’s so good to see you two.”

“You too, Mrs. Byers. Thanks so much for having us.”

“Oh, of course, sweetie, I’m glad you could make it.”

The Byers’ Christmas tree is still up, Steve notices once he’s ushered inside. It’s nearly a week after Christmas but it’s still standing in a corner of the living room, glowing softly with colorful lights. Then Steve steps closer, and can’t help the shout of laughter that escapes him.

“Dude, is that _you?_ ”

“What—no! No, no, that’s—” Jonathan grabs Steve’s hand, trying in vain to drag him away from the tree. “That’s Will.”

“Oh my god, no it’s not, that’s _definitely_ you. Nancy, look at this!”

Nancy carefully takes the ornament in her hand, tilting it up so she can examine it better. It’s an old school photo pasted onto a flimsy cardboard star. The kid in it is frowning determinedly, glaring out from under bangs that almost cover his eyes. She lets out a laugh that sounds almost like a cackle. “Oh my god, Jonathan, you haven’t changed at _all_.”

“What—yes I have!”

“No you haven’t! Look—Steve—he’s still got that little crinkle between his eyes!”

Grinning, Steve turns to look at Jonathan, who’s frowning and flustered enough that the crinkle is more prominent than ever. “Yeah, he does. Don’t worry,” he adds when Jonathan opens his mouth to protest, “it’s cute.”

“The cutest,” confirms Nancy, and Jonathan flushes deeply.

Still smiling, Steve leans down and kisses the corner of his mouth, because that’s something that he can just _do_ now, whenever he feels like it.

“There’s another one on the back of the tree!” shouts El as she scampers past, pulling Max by the hand.

 _“El!”_ Jonathan complains, but she’s already disappeared down the hallway, her and Max’s giggles echoing back to them.

—

“…said she’d make breakfast.”

“Really? I thought that was your job.”

“Was. I taught her how to make pancakes and now she wants to show off for everyone.”

“That’s so cute.”

Steve can _hear_ the smile in Jonathan’s voice. “She’s the best.”

He opens his eyes. Jonathan’s room is dim, the only light coming in around the edges of the curtains. From somewhere—the kitchen, he supposes—he can hear muffled voices, and he smells bacon and what must be the pancakes. “Smells good,” he mumbles into Jonathan’s hair.

Jonathan laughs. Steve can’t see his face, since he’s holding Jonathan from behind, but Nancy is facing both of them and he can see hers when she says, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

“Mm. Morning.”

He rubs his thumb back and forth over Jonathan’s stomach, the bare skin warm and soft. He’s so comfortable. He’s never been so comfortable in his life. He lets his eyes slide shut again.

“Hey!” Nancy reaches over Jonathan to shove at his shoulder. “No more sleeping. El’s making breakfast and we are _not_ going to miss it.”

“Of course not,” Steve says, though he doesn’t open his eyes. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything.” Then he slides his hand a little lower on Jonathan’s abdomen and smiles into Jonathan’s hair at the tiny intake of breath that the move elicits. “Well. _Almost_ anything.”

He opens his eyes just in time to see Nancy rolling hers. “What, _now?_ ” she says, but she says it fondly.

Jonathan pulls slightly away from Steve, just enough to roll onto his back so that he can look up into his face. He throws an arm up over his head, resting it on the pillow, and grins at Steve lazily. “Now’s good,” he says, and raises his head slightly for a kiss.

Steve returns it eagerly, reaching out for Nancy at the same time and finding her bare shoulder. He runs his hand down her arm, reveling in the goosebumps he can feel in its wake. When he’s finished kissing Jonathan, he props himself up on one elbow and leans over to kiss Nancy as well. He’s about to move his hand to her waist when a pounding on the door startles them apart.

“Breakfast is served!” shouts Dustin through the door.

All three of them look at one another, and burst into giggles.

“What’s so funny? I swear to God, if you’re being _gross_ in there—”

“We’re _coming!_ ” Steve shouts.

“Not this morning, we aren’t,” Nancy says under her breath, and Jonathan stifles a snort in his hand while Steve whacks her lightly on the arm.

“Alright,” he sighs, rolling out of bed and pulling on his shirt, then finding Jonathan’s and tossing it to him. “Let’s go eat your sister’s pancakes.”

—

“FIVE MINUTES,” Dustin bellows.

“Jesus, we _know!_ ” says Max. “And you don’t need to shout, we’re all _right here!_ ”

“HE’S EXCITED!” El shouts it right in Max’s face, and despite what Steve knows are her best efforts at staying annoyed, Max’s face cracks into a smile. “AND I AM TOO!”

From the couch, Hopper rolls his eyes fondly. “Alright, kid. Take it down a notch.”

Mrs. Byers takes a sip of wine, sitting next to him—very close next to him, Steve’s noticed, though Jonathan says his mother hasn’t yet admitted that they’re in an actual relationship. Then she sets her glass down and jumps up suddenly. “Oh! We have—Will, where did we put the, the…”

“The?” he prompts with a smirk.

“The—oh, you know! The New Year’s stuff!”

“Kitchen. I’ll go get it.”

Will returns a moment later with a bulging shopping bag, which he dumps out on the coffee table. It’s a mess of tacky New Year’s Eve stuff—hats and party horns and a few pairs of those ridiculous 1986 glasses.

“FOUR MINUTES!”

“Shut _up!_ ”

Max takes a party horn and blows it in Lucas’s direction. She’s standing so close to him that when the paper tongue unfurls it hits him in the cheek, and he grabs his own to do the same thing back to her. El positions a hat carefully on her head demands that Mike put one on too, and Steve knows that Mike’s only scowling to save face because there’s so many people around. He selects a hat that matches El’s, and then El finds a third matching hat and tosses it to Will. Dustin jams a pair of the glasses onto his face. “THREE MINUTES,” he shouts.

Steve turns back to Nancy and Jonathan to find them both already watching him. He blushes under their twin looks of affection. “What?”

“The way you watch the kids,” says Jonathan. “It’s sweet.”

He flushes even deeper. “Yeah, well, you know. They’re good kids.”

“They are.” Nancy takes his hand, and one of Jonathan’s. Then, in a lower voice: “You ready?”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. A new year. Everything.”

“Well, I don’t know about _everything,_ ” Steve jokes. “But I’m definitely ready for you two.”

Jonathan takes his other hand. “I don’t think anyone’s ever been _ready_ for Nancy Wheeler.”

“Okay, that’s true,” Steve agrees, and remembers too his thought from yesterday, about how he’s never prepared for Jonathan either. “But I’m ready to be _not_ ready for both of you for the rest of my life.”

“The rest of your life?” Nancy’s voice is teasing, but her face is serious. “That’s a long time.”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugs. “You guys are it for me.”

He wonders, the moment it’s left his mouth, whether it’s the right thing to say. Maybe it’s too much too soon. Maybe he’s just scared them away by committing too fast. It’s only been a month, after all, and for most of that time they’ve been apart. Maybe—

“You’re it for me, too,” says Jonathan, squeezing his hand.

“TWO MINUTES!” shouts Dustin.

“Me too,” says Nancy. “God, just a few more months of this, and then—”

“—we can be together for real,” finishes Jonathan.

“Every day,” continues Nancy.

And though Steve’s the happiest he’s ever been, hands joined with Nancy and Jonathan and the kids making chaos all around them, their words bring back his anxiety over the future. He’s been trying to put it out of his mind for weeks, but here they are, talking about it as if everything’s already settled when really _nothing_ is, and even though the timing is terrible, he can’t help but blurt out, “Where, though?”

A crease appears between Nancy’s eyes. “What?”

“Where will we go? I mean, you two will graduate, and you’re obviously going to college, but Jonathan’s here, and we’re in Indiana—”

“We’ll figure it out,” Jonathan says calmly. “Nance and I can go to school in the same city—we’ve applied to a few of the same places—and you can come live with us, Steve. Keep working, or go to community college, whatever you want.”

When Steve doesn’t answer, Jonathan frowns slightly. “You…you don’t want to stay in Hawkins, do you? We just thought…”

“ONE MINUTE!” It’s the whole chorus of kids this time, even louder now that the actual moment is so close.

“I don’t care about Hawkins itself,” Steve says slowly. “But I don’t…”

“Shit,” says Nancy when he trails off. “We shouldn’t have assumed anything. We should have talked about this for real. It’s just, Jonathan and I have been discussing it for so long, I just sort of…forgot. That this might change things.”

For the first time since Thanksgiving, Steve feels a sudden stab of jealousy, or maybe guilt. “Sorry to mess up your plans,” he says. He means it genuinely, but it comes out more coolly than he intends. He regrets it immediately.

Nancy looks hurt, apologetic. “Steve…”

“It’s okay,” says Jonathan, and Steve isn’t sure whether he’s accepting the apology on his behalf or trying to reassure the both of them. “We don’t have to do this right now. We’ll work it out. Right? We’ll work it out.”

“Right,” says Nancy, though she still sounds worried. Steve feels the same way.

“Hey.” Jonathan steps closer to both of them. “Everything will be okay. As long as we’re together.”

It’s a miracle, Steve thinks, that Jonathan’s still able to believe that. After everything he’s been through—losing his brother and barely getting him back, watching as his mom was forced to grieve again and again, fighting monsters in his own home, leaving that home behind—it seems impossible that Jonathan can really think that their being together is enough to overcome any obstacle.

Or maybe—Steve isn’t sure who leans in first, but all three of them press their foreheads together, so close their noses are brushing. Maybe it’s _because_ of all those things that Jonathan believes it. After all, he _did_ get his brother back. His mom grieved, but then she healed. The rest of them are healing, too. And it’s because they’re together—Jonathan and his family, Nancy and Mike, Steve and Robin and all the kids. And the three of them, too, now.

So he doesn’t argue. Just repeats after Jonathan, “As long as we’re together.”

“TEN!” shout the kids. “NINE! EIGHT! SEVEN!”

“I love you,” Nancy says quietly.

“SIX! FIVE! FOUR!”

“I love you,” Jonathan echoes.

“I love you.”

“THREE! TWO! ONE!”

They exchange midnight kisses. It’s awkward and clumsy, trying to arrange three separate kisses during the first single second of the year, but they make it work. Then, before Steve can pull back, Nancy’s kissing him again, this time on the cheek. It’s gentle, almost chaste, and for some reason it makes Steve’s eyes grow damp with tears.

When she speaks, her lips are still pressed to his cheek. It tickles when they move. “Happy New Year,” she whispers.

—

Things wind down quickly not long after midnight. El and Will hug Hopper and Mrs. Byers goodnight. Dustin surprises Steve by hugging him tightly and wishing him a happy new year in a voice that sounds entirely genuine. Max surprises him even more by doing the same. Steve hugs them both back and wonders when he became the sort of person that gets teary-eyed over hugs from children.

He and Nancy and Jonathan and the adults stay in the living room for awhile longer after the kids have disappeared. Mrs. Byers pours them each a glass of wine—“Just a little,” she says, “I can’t be a completely irresponsible parent,” though she fills the glasses generously—and they sit in comfortable, sleepy silence punctuated only occasionally by conversation. Mrs. Byers and Hopper don’t seem to mind when Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan squeeze into one armchair together, so Steve doesn’t let himself mind that they’re there to see it.

It’s just after one in the morning when Mrs. Byers stretches and yawns. “I think I’m gonna turn in,” she says. She pats Hopper’s knee and stands. “Happy New Year, guys.”

 _Happy New Year,_ they all murmur back. A couple minutes after she’s left, Jonathan suggests that they should go to bed too, and Nancy nods her agreement.

Steve stands up with them, intending to follow, but when they start to leave the room he stays put. They turn back to him with quizzical expressions.

“Just give me a minute,” he says. “I’ll be right there.”

Nancy looks like she wants to ask for an explanation, but Jonathan just smiles softly at Steve and says, “Alright.” He puts a hand on Nancy’s arm and guides her gently from the room.

He stands there in silence for a long moment, watching the hallway that Nancy and Jonathan have disappeared down. Then Hopper clears his throat. “You okay, kid?”

Steve starts, as if he’d forgotten Hopper was there, which is ridiculous because he’d stayed behind specifically to catch him alone. “Yeah. I just, uh, I wondered if I could ask you a question?”

Hopper looks at him in a way that makes Steve feel a bit like his mind is being read. He’s nervous suddenly, irrationally so. He hasn’t spent much time with Hopper, and even less alone with him. There’s still something inexplicably intimidating about this man even now that Steve’s seen him crying as he hugged his daughter and laughing with the kids at the dinner table.

“Sure,” says Hopper after what feels like a very long time but is probably only a second or two. “What’s up?”

Steve sits back down in the armchair he just vacated. He hesitates a moment before beginning. He hasn’t exactly planned this conversation; he’d only decided to have it about fifteen seconds ago. “Did you ever regret staying in Hawkins?” he asks eventually.

Hopper looks surprised by the question, but seems to be taking it seriously. He considers his answer for a few seconds before speaking. “No,” he says eventually. “I never regretted it.”

“Do you wish you could go back, then?”

A dry chuckle. “No.” For a second, Steve thinks that’s all the answer he’s going to get, but then Hopper continues. “It was never about the town, you know? At first I was just there because I had nowhere else to be. But then there was El, and Joyce and the boys. It’s the people that made it worth it. But now those people aren’t in Hawkins anymore, so there’s no reason for me to go back there.” Another pause. “Why do you ask?”

 _Because Nancy and Jonathan want me to move away with them, and I want that too, but I’m fucking terrified and I can’t imagine leaving the kids._ But Steve doesn’t know how to say that without sounding ridiculous.

“You thinking of leaving Hawkins?”

Steve nods, looking down at his hands. “Yeah, uh, after—” He glances briefly up at Hopper, then back down. “After Nancy and Jonathan graduate.”

Hopper doesn’t say anything, and it takes Steve a moment to realize that he’s waiting for him to continue.

“But I don’t know if I can just…leave. I mean, I’d still have people in Hawkins, too. Robin, and the kids, and…” He trails off.

There’s another long pause before Hopper answers. “Kid, you know none of them will be there forever. Robin’s gonna graduate this year too, right? From what I know about her, she doesn’t seem like the kinda person who’d hang around in Hawkins her whole life. And the kids’ll be graduating too before too long and they’re all gonna be able to go wherever they want, they’re so smart.” He pauses. “Don’t tell any of them I said that.”

“No promises,” says Steve, trying not to smile.

Hopper smiles back.

 _I almost called,_ he wants to say. _There were so many times. I wish I had called. I’m so glad you’re here now._ Instead, he just says, “Thank you.”

“Sure,” says Hopper easily. Another silence follows and Steve thinks that’s the end of the conversation. He’s about to excuse himself to bed, but then Hopper starts speaking again. His voice is a little lower now, more serious. “Look,” he says, “I don’t know what your family is like, and I don’t wanna overstep. But…we’ve got your back, Steve. All of us. As long as you need us. And that’s gonna be true even when none of us are left in Hawkins anymore.”

Steve feels a wave of something like relief rush through him at Hopper’s words. He’s pretty sure that if he opens his mouth, he’ll burst into tears.

“Besides,” Hopper adds, “I doubt I could get rid of you now even I wanted to. I hear you’re pretty involved with my son these days.”

Steve blushes, but Hopper sounds more amused than anything. And, he realizes with a smile, Hopper’s just called Jonathan his son. He’ll have to remember to tell him.

“Thank you,” he says again, after swallowing hard.

Hopper nods. “Any time, kid.” ****

—

He pauses outside Jonathan’s door. He can hear them inside, murmuring softly to each other, and for a few seconds he stands there with his eyes shut, letting the sound wash over him. Finally, he knocks softly on the door as he opens it. “Hey,” he says quietly.

They’re sitting on Jonathan’s bed, on top of the covers, Nancy leaning into Jonathan’s side with her head on his shoulder. He’s got an arm around her, his thumb rubbing absent circles on her shoulder.

“Hey,” says Nancy, and they both look so soft. In the dim glow of Jonathan’s lamp, they look so warm and gentle and open, and _god,_ Steve loves them. He loves them so much.

He imagines what it could be to make this permanent, to make it _real._ He could stand outside the door of their shitty apartment, maybe their house one day, and hear them laughing together. He could come in to find them curled up and waiting, ready for him. He could come home to this every day for the rest of his life.

This could be his future, if he lets it.

And, god, how could he ever have doubted it? Of course he’ll let it. Of course he’ll follow them wherever they want to go. Of course.

“Everything okay?” asks Jonathan, and Steve realizes he’s still standing in the doorway.

“Yeah. Everything’s okay.”

He comes all the way into the room, shuts the door behind him.

“Everything’s great.”

—

They leave again two days later. On the Byers’ front porch they hold Jonathan tightly, make plans for him to come up to Hawkins during his next school break. It’s a long time away, but it also isn’t, really. They promise to call.

From the passenger seat of Nancy’s car, he watches Mrs. Byers and El and Will waving. Hopper doesn’t wave, but the look on his face is something like a smile. And Jonathan just watches them as they back out of the driveway. On his face is written all the love in the world.

A few years ago, Steve could never have imagined all this. He never used to think of himself as unhappy. Things were alright; he had friends, and his basketball team, and a nice enough life. Sometimes, he still catches himself grieving for the version of himself that could have been, if none of this had ever happened.

But it did happen. He did fall in love with Nancy Wheeler, and her little brother’s best friend did get lost in the woods, and he did fight more than one classmate and lose, and he did go to bat against more than one monster and win. He did fall in love with Jonathan Byers.

And now he has a future with both of them.

It’s scary, the idea of growing up, of moving on, of leaving home. It’s fucking terrifying. But he’ll always have the kids. He’ll always be there for them, even if he isn’t in Hawkins. And he’ll always have Robin, no matter where they both end up. And now he has Nancy and Jonathan, too.

In six months, they’ll be gone from this place. He doesn’t know yet where they’ll go. But he can picture it easily—a moving truck, all their things in boxes, ready to start their new life together. In his mind, it’s a clear, sunny day, warm but not oppressive. All the kids are there, and Robin; they’ll all have come down with Nancy and Steve to see them off together. Hopper and Mrs. Byers will be standing arm in arm on the front porch. They’ll wave as Steve rounds the corner with the loves of his life.

Leaving won’t be easy. But Steve knows they’ll be okay.

They’ve faced worse monsters.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! you can find me on tumblr @ diogxnes

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Just Breathe](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21549349) by [asexualjuliet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asexualjuliet/pseuds/asexualjuliet)




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